My SO has searched high and low for his ideal "lunch pail," as he likes to call it, and finally asked that I make one up for him. He wanted it totally plain; ideally, it would look like a brown paper bag, but would be insulated and/or waterproof. As luck would have it, Lana had recently purchased a Japanese craft book on making lunch totes, which I borrowed.
We decided that this one would do the job nicely.
We couldn't find the reflective insulating material that lines most ready-made bags, but we did find a cool iron-on vinyl. I found a plain brown cotton drill that looks somewhat like brown paper, and found a nice brown gingham to iron the vinyl onto for the interior. (the picture below is of the floral lining I used for my own lunch bag. After doing the first one, there was enough material left to do a second!)
I made my promise back in January, but it wasn't until I came up to Albany to visit Lana that I put scissor to cloth. While I was there, Lana helped me translate the instructions, and thank goodness I waited, because it would have been a disaster if I'd proceeded with the diagrams only.
I was also able to take advantage of her cutting board, quilting rulers, rotary cutter, Bernina sewing machine, and various bits of sewing odds and ends that made the whole process much less painful. The only downside was that there was a heat wave, and I sweated buckets while laboring over the fabric in 95-degree weather. At 6:30 there was a giant thunderstorm. Rico - a friend who was staying with us - and I ran downstairs to stand in the rain like they do in the movies. It always
looks so refreshing and liberating. Not so in real life. Unfortunately, this was no gentle summer storm. The rain was COLD, as in, about 50 degrees. With 25 mph gusts of wind lashing at us and horrific crashes of thunder and lighting seeming to occur right over us, we only stayed for 5 minutes and returned, drenched and defeated, into the stifling apartment again. Still, I perservered, and after four hours of labor, I ended up with a wonderful new lunch tote!
It's different from the picture in the book(much less feminine!) and has a fastener rather than a strap, but it turned out well!
2 comments:
That is so frikkin' adorable! Well done! Your SO is lucky.
Should've known that Japan would've come up with a sewing book just for lunch totes.
How did the moving go, by the way?
Just got back from Albany! The move was terrifying...one guy couldn't come because he had his appendix out. Our cousins almost backed out at the last moment because they were busy in Pittsburgh until the night before, cleaning up their apartment after renting it out to some irresponsible, coke-sniffing CMU students. We wouldn't have been able to move any of Lana's heavy, bulky furniture up and down two twisting stairs without some boy power. Finally, we had to wake up, drive an hour into the Berkshires to pick up one of them, bring him back (since his brother had taken the car), and met up with the other one back in Albany on his way home from Pittsburgh. Then the UHaul people didn't have our truck! No one who had rented the trucks the previous day had returned any, so we ended up having to make do with two vans instead. Anyways, it all turned out OK in the end.
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