project #14: reusable lunch bag

This project has been on my To-Do list for over 2 months. I first saw the tutorial for it online who knows how long ago and ordered the oil cloth fabric for it at the end of February. I have enough to make like 10 or something, but this is numero uno. The idea is that this fabric is sturdy and water proof so that it'll make a great reusable lunch bag. It's better than those insulated ones because a) it's lighter-weight, b) I made it myself!

The bag in the tutorial has the wrong side of the fabric inside, but I didn't like how that looked, so I doubled the fabric so that it was the same inside and out. I used some olive green thread as a contrasting color because I liked how it looked and I didn't want to be bogged down trying to find the perfect yellow match. The tutorial bag also used a zig-zag stitch which I am really not a fan of: I think it makes everything look amateurish. (My stuff doesn't need any more help with that, thank you very much.)

As you can see, the bag itself is a little oblong and not symmetrical. I'm not exactly sure how that happened, but I'm not super worried about it since it's just for personal use. Also it's a lunch bag.

Here's the bottom. It's also a little uneven: you can see that the right seam is longer than the left one. Again, not exactly sure how that happened other than inexact measurements. The oil cloth is hard to cut exactly right because it's so slippery so measurements and cuts weren't quite as perfect as they could have been.

Maybe when I make a few more I'll figure out how to take care of those inconsistencies...

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!