project #6: umbrella bag

Hey! It looks like an umbrella! 

But it's really a bag...made out of an umbrella!

Ever since I saw a tutorial about this on instructables.com I have been wanting to make it. Luckily my good friend Matt-O has a mom that never throws anything away, so he had a bounty of broken umbrellas for me to pick from (although when I went over to his house to pick them up we could only find two, and both were black). 

This bag was made from just one umbrella, just like the tutorial, and it came together fairly easily. The only thing that threw me for a little bit of a loop was attaching the handles because I felt like there was a "right" and "wrong" side and I wasn't sure how I wanted to handle it (ar ar ar) so I took a break and went to work and hung out with my friend Erin and had a generally jolly time then came back and decided it didn't matter and sewed them on and finished it up. It's a little more light-weight than bags I usually choose (since my favorites are generally canvas) but I do like how you can roll it back up to make it all small and secure it with the original umbrella snap thing to store it or put in your pocket or whatever. Pretty handy.

I also decided that I needed to come up with a good use for the broken umbrella frame to make this a complete project. Erin was laughing at me because the whole time we were talking I was playing with it and she said I was going to poke my eye out and then I'd be sorry, but nothing of the sort even happened. I did however come up with a wonderful idea of using it as a little display tree for my button earrings that I make. Since I mount the buttons on these little bird cards I thought it could be cute to use tiny binder clips to attach the birds to the metal branches of the umbrella frame to display them. I could put the umbrella itself in a tiny pot and fill it with marbles or something to steady the base and I think it could look pretty cool!

I took the picture below to help illustrate my vision. Ideally there would be more birds (obviously) and the binders clips would be smaller. Also the frame would be anchored somehow, not being held by my hand. Yes. Looks like a project #7 in the making to me!