A Zig Zag on a Straight Line

From the beginning, H has had a hard time in school. Every year seems to get a little bit better overall as he matures, but there is always a period of time when things have been going swimmingly and nothing significant has changed that, BLAM-O!, I'm broad-sided with a few weeks of behaviors and choices that make me want to pull my hair out. This year, the culmination was on Monday and that evening I noticed he had a little bit of a cold, so I decided I would keep him home the next day to spend some time with him one-on-one. Without going into it too deeply, (that could be a whole blog on its own) he is such a great kid; quirky, funny, wicked smart, awesome imagination, but man is he strong-willed! He'll be a force to be reckoned with as an adult and I just have to keep repeating that to myself. Daily. Multiple times. 

I almost never keep my kids home for a sick day, so this was his first of the year and after we dropped Charlie at school and put Jack down for his nap, we had the afternoon to ourselves. 

I asked him what he wanted to do, and he said he wanted to make a gift for Charlie; a 'dragon head' bag to take his sharing objects to school each week. After we talked about logistics, I had him pick the fabric for a bag for each of them, and found an image on the computer which we printed on printable burlap. The images aren't super crisp on the burlap, it's probably something I'd use for a big bold letter for a bunting in the future, but I actually like how these turned out. The burlap has a plastic coating on the back that guides it through your printer really smoothly, and negated the need for interfacing. It was H's first time really using the sewing machine alone and he did a great job! He took his time, and it only took about an hour from picking the fabric to proudly holding his finished bag. 

After several attempts to find a dragon image that we could agree was good to take to pre-k, we switched to finding Lego images for Charlie's bag and stumble across what I'm guessing was a party favor label, because there were several names; score! Henry chose this image of a person challenging a dragon for his own. 

For the blue bag, we used a fat quarter and cut it in half so that the bottom edge was the fold. The image was sewn onto the bag before seaming. Both bags were a long, thin piece with just the two side-seams to sew, and then the top was folded over twice and hemmed. I didn't have him pin it, because stopping to take the pins out seemed like it would complicate things for such a simple, straight seam. 

Love those little boy hands against the fabric

I was pretty impressed with how straight and consistent his stitches were! He honestly did this ALL by himself.

All ready to take snacks and sharing to school