Keepin' ya in kippahs

I love my son's preschool. We have 3 kids and we've moved around a bit, so we've seen a few. And of all the many preschools we've had dealings with, this one is far and away the most haimish while still being organized and a "tight ship".

But the one thing they aren't all that good at is keeping track of personal belongings. I sewed a blanket for my daughter's nap-time there. They lost it. I sewed a blanket for my son's nap-time--they lost it. And then one day my son came home without his kippah. It happens to be a special kippah - the one we gave him at his upsherin (1st haircutting). But it's gone, and probably for good. I have to say, I was sad.

My son read my sadness. He decided he didn't want to wear kippot to school any more, in case he lost them. After I got over my mope, I realized this was not the message I wanted to send. But at $15 - $25 a pop, I didn't want to have to buy kippahs for him all the time and this place just doesn't place a high priority on personal belongings. So I went to sew him one.

There is a pattern you can buy for kippahs, but I don't own it and I didn't feel like wasting the time with the mail-order process. (I'm sure it's a good pattern though, it's a good company.) And I saw a few patterns available on the web. So I downloaded the most sensible looking pattern and whipped it up.

The arc of the wedge was all wrong. I wound up with a nice little cap that would maaaaybe fit on the head of an American Girl doll. Feh. So I had to redraft the curve. After a few tries I got a nice fit for an almost-4-year-old's head. And then I decided that since I went this far I might as well draft one for my husband. You can't really just scale up - but after drafting the 1st one I knew where the curve had to be and I got it right in 2 tries, so it wasn't a lot of effort.

These take almost no time to whip up, and barely any fabric. They have a nice curve to them - not too high (dorky) and not too flat (unprofessional looking). The boys now want to match - easy to do! The pattern is on the front page of my website in pdf form and here's a photo of the boys wearing the test kippot below:

So now there's a tested kippah pattern out there for quilting cottons. Have at it, sewing yiddishekeit!

Yakking Green Things

• I'm halfway through The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's a good read and neither dry nor preachy.
  
• Like me, my husband's first career was in academic science. He was a climate researcher (I was a molecular biologist).
  
• I live within a mile of the Pacific ocean. I see plastic bags floating next to the kids playing in the surf. You can't walk on the beach without stepping on someone's cigarette butt or discarded trash.
  

These are the things that pull me green.

I also live in a part of the country that is staunchly green green green. In some cases, nauseatingly, self-congratulatory, obnoxiously green. In other cases, cute-to-the-point-of-twee green. And in nearly all cases, expensively green. Green is for the wealthy... the well-educated holier-than-thou infinitely-more-chic-than-you elite.

These are the things that make me want to leave ziplock baggies full of compostable dog poop on the lawns of city officials and bicycle-nazis everywhere. So sue me.

Anyway. Thankfully rational thought trumps visceral reaction, and I've been slowly implementing green changes in the way I run my house. Biodegradable detergent, a rag to clean the table instead of paper towels, more diligent recycling... and more. I picked up Sewing Green which is a decent book that covers things found in plenty of other books (Sew and Stow comes to mind) but puts a recycling spin on all of it. This gave me the idea of making sandwich wraps out of PUL (PolyUrethane Laminated fabric) and quilting cotton in order to reduce ziplock bag use. And that got me to thinking about all the other ways in which I use ziplock bags... plastic bags destined for the landfill.

The problem with sewing your own ziplock bags is that for food safety sake, you need to get them very clean between uses. While it's true you can wash and dry PUL on hot repeatedly without problems, it is still a hazard to leave crumbs and moisture in corners of bags. I thought about making 3 sides out of velcro to eliminate corners, but frankly, I thought that would suck. Sewing velcro on things just barely makes it into the "good" column in my list of super powers - that stuff borders on evil in so very many circumstances. And then I had the lightbulb moment - why does a bag need to have corners at all? The sandwich bag companies make them rectangular to maximize use of material, but I don't need to do that. So there it is - I drafted an oval bag shape - no corners for crumbs. E=mc^2 it isn't, but hey, it's free.

It's a fairly small bag. I'm finding all these reusables are pretty bulky to put in a kid's lunchbox, and you're not using these for sandwiches (wraps are much better for that purpose). It holds a reasonable serving of berries or crackers or cookies or whatever. If you want it bigger, print it out at 125% or more.

You can get 2 bags out of a fat quarter of PUL (PolyUrethaneLaminated fabric - used extensively for cloth diapering and hospital settings - tolerated even by most people with chemical sensitivities), a fat quarter of quilting fabric, 4" of velcro and less than a half yard of binding. You can make it without the binding - just sew lining to exterior most of the way around the "mouth" RST, flip and edge stitch the flipping-hole closed - but I like the look of binding better. Anyway, it's a minimal investment of time and materials.