What's for lunch?

I take my lunch to work almost every day. At work, we have several refrigerators for keeping lunches, cream cheese for the bagels, and milk for the latte machine. There are lots of lunch bags in there that look really similar. So, as part of my ongoing quest to improve my sewing skills, I decided to make a lunch bag of possibly the loudest, kitchen-oriented fabric I could find.

This is something of an extension from my purse experiment: it's a small bag, with a lining, but also with padding in between the outside and the lining. I used some thin quilt batting for the padding. There is also a flap and a small handle.

This bag really brought home to me that the lining needs to be slightly smaller than the outside of the bag. Because of the padding, the lining I cut and sewed to be the same size as the outside, was too big. The fabric ended up getting a little bunched in places.

The other thing I learned is that sewing on velcro with a sewing machine is way easier than doing so by hand. I started to sew it by hand, thinking that would be easier than wedging the bag under the sewing foot. But, the little hooks on the velcro really grab hold of the thread as it's passing through. For some reason, the sewing machine didn't have a problem at all.

That's about it. The velcro was still easier to work with than zippers. The quilt batting I have is not slick on the sides, so adjusting the lining and padding before I pinned it was on the difficult side.

I've been "working on" this lunch bag for over a month (which is to say, I started it and then ignored it for three weeks). I think some of the flaws that showed up could have been avoided if I had slowed down, but I was too anxious to get it done with. Both so I can use the bag and so I can change the thread color to hem some curtains. :)