Shortly after I saw my friend’s red school bag and learned about its structural details, I had another encounter with my dream school bag. At my local music school, I had a friend who was a year older than me, and she one day came to our group class directly from primary school wearing her school bag! Her school bag was of a beautiful rose pink colour and it had decorations of Snoopy character in various places of the bag. I particularly liked the colour and the shiny smoothness of her bag. That day, I decided that I would like to have the exact same model for my own school bag.
“I will get a Snoopy’s rose pink school bag!”
I would tell my mother over and over.
Toward the end of the summer, I was playing at one of my two childhood bestfriends’ house and her mother had a box of strawberry cake to offer us. Unlike usual, it wasn’t the cake but the box which interested me that day. The cake box was large and had a perfect square shape, reminding me of my dream school bag. Once my friend’s mother emptied the box, I asked her if I could take the box back home. She didn’t understand why I wanted to keep the box, but of course she let me take it.
Back home, I started to craft my dream school bag out of this cake box. I first cut the box so that one side of the box would open like the lid of a school bag. I then painted the box surface in rose pink colour and coated the lid with a transparent plastic wrap to mimic the shiny smooth lid of my dream school bag. I even created pockets inside the bag recalling what I saw in my friend’s school bag the other day. Finally, I attached two straps to the box so that I could wear it on my back.
When the craft was done, I wore it and went to show it to my parents. They were amazed by the way a cake box was turned into my dream school bag and told me that it really looked like a real school bag. I was happy, but I knew it wasn’t the same as a real one. However well it captured the essence of my dream school bag, it was still a cake box after all.
As the season transitioned from Summer to Autumn, my longing for my dream school bag became stronger and stronger.