lunch!

Tomorrow is Lila’s first day of preschool, and along with going to preschool comes packing a lunch…and yet another opportunity to sew something fun! Luckily, one of my many purchased-long-ago-but-never-made patterns was this little lunch bag:

The pattern is called Love your Lunch Box by Gingercake Patterns. She designed it for her daughter to carry to Kindergarten, so it’s perfectly sized for little hands (though big enough to carry an adult lunch, too).

The inside is lined with laminated cotton for easy clean up:

And there are two little outer side pockets

which are perfectly sized for snack bars and fruit leathers and such.

I worked backwards with the fabric on this one – I knew there wasn’t going to be a huge selection of laminated cottons to choose from, so I picked something neutral for the inside then looked through my stash for something to match. This is a Japanese print I bought a few years ago at Cool Cottons, and I’ve been waiting for the right project to come around to use it.

The outer layer calls for heavy weight interfacing, and the inside in insulated with Insul-Bright batting. So it’s got a nice sturdy shape and keeps the contents cool or warm.

Update – Oops, I just realized that her name needs to be on it somewhere (duh). Rubber stamps on twill tape to the rescue.

I bought a little two-tiered bento box to put inside, and now I can’t stop perusing the millions of cute little bento lunch ideas floating around online.

And this may be humorous to no one but me, but when I went to upload my lunch bag photos, my husband had done his own little clandestine photo shoot. Clearly I’m not the only one around here who’s been researching preschool-appropriate lunches. Ha ha. Funny, honey.

Lest you think we eat Pop Tarts over here, those were purchased by my husband for a camping trip and never opened…until the middle of the night last week when I discovered them in the cupboard and the baby begged me to have one, so what could I do? And that corn and crab chowder, which was a bad idea in the first place, expired in 2006 – but instead of getting rid of it like sensible people, we somehow began a tradition of planting it in various places around the house for each other to find. We’re easily amused. And for anyone curious, the jar contains some highly suspect tuna fish. Kind of a seafood theme going on…

Anyway, it’s clear who’ll be in charge of packing Lila’s lunch.

Oh, and the pattern came with a bonus reusable snack bag pattern as well, so I made up a few of those to go along with the lunch bag.

These are the easiest thing ever. They close with a big strip of velcro and can be customized to any size. I lined them with some white PUL, that waterproof diaper fabric (thanks, Amanda!).

That’s it! Here’s a preview of Lila’s first-day-of-school dress. We did a day-before photo shoot this morning, just to be safe 🙂