Preschool Prep 3

 

My last post was about K's lunch bags for preschool. After lunch, the next step is for the kiddies to brush their teeth. As a result, I also had to make a bag to hold K's toothbrush, toothpaste and cup.

For this bag, I chose the realistic Shinkansen fabric (for those of you in the know, it is actually プラレール fabric). K's two favorite Shinkansens are Dr. Yellow and Hayabusa. I made sure the part of the fabric that I chose for the bag had those two on it.

 

I wanted a drawstring bag, and used a pattern from a sewing magazine for the basic idea. The bag in the magazine, however was not lined. I really wanted all of the bags to have the same white and green lining, so I had to make some adjustments.

This bag  was super easy to make and would have been even faster without the lining. Start by cutting the outside and lining fabric. I just just cut a long rectangle for each. Then fold the rectangle in half and sew from the folded edge up the side, leaving a bit of space for the drawstring. Do the same on the other side and for the lining.

Then square off the corners of both the lining and outside fabric.

Next stitch down the seam you left open at the top of the bag. Do this for all four of the open corners. This will keep the fabric from becoming all messy with the drawstring.

Then just put the lining inside the main fabric, fold the top edge down twice making sure there is space for the drawstring to go through and topstitch it down. After doing this, I realized it would have been a bit better (but slightly more complicated) to cut the lining a tiny bit shorter so that you wouldn't have so much bulk in the folded over bit. It's not a big deal, but might have been easier to pull open and shut.

For the ends of the drawstring, I wanted to use the dotted fabric to keep the knots from coming loose. I sewed two tiny rectangles and once I got the drawstring through the bag, I tied a knot and then sewed a rectangle around each knot.

If you were to do this, I would definitely recommend using a zipper foot. It was quite bulky and caused a few problems with my walking foot.

Here is the completed bag with K's cup, toothbrush and toothpaste. Once all of these bags were done, I asked K which was his favorite, totally expecting him to say the Thomas ones. Lo and behold, he claimed this as his favorite. I felt so bad since this is the smallest bag. I should have guessed that this would be the winner due to his favorite Shinkansens being featured. Boo.

Luckily, I still had to make him two towels for cleaning himself off. I cut out one Hayabusa and one Dr. Yellow and appliqued those trains onto the towels. Just a note, if you have to make some towels for some reason, use a straight stitch. If you look closely, you will notice that the top towel is really wavy - I used a zig zag stitch to top stitch and it made a mess. The bottom towel was straight stitched and turned out much better.

At this point, I was nearly done with K's school preparations. All that was left was to sew a ribbon into the tag of his raincoat so it can be hung up easily. The raincoat also needed elastic in the sleeves. Both of those were really quick to do up. I also had to move the buttons on his suspenders so that they would actually try to hold his shorts up. When buying the (quite pricey) uniform, the teacher helping me told me that almost everyone buys a size large so that the kids can wear them until they graduate kindergarten - for K that will be in four years!

K is skinny to begin with, so I knew the large was going to be massive on his waist. I took the waist in a bit as well to help them stay on his skinny, little body.

The final step was to shorten the sleeves on his jacket. Again, as a large, it is pretty massive, but I couldn't do much to fix it aside from this.

The sleeves fit much better now, but the chest is still huge. Oh well, maybe he will grow into it over the next four years??

 

The final step in getting him ready is to label EVERYTHING. I am going to let Y do that! I am done. Now I get to focus on some projects for me. ;)