Vegetarian's Got A Brand New Bag

Last time I mentioned I bought scrap bags of leather from Hobby Lobby & Michael's, and that I was using them to make a bag. Here's the previous photo:

It's finished! And I've actually taken it out on a few journeys and it hasn't fallen apart or anything! Here it is:

I added a pocket to the inside flap:

and a pocket on the inside back:

To the left of that pocket you can sort of see the loop I installed to clip my keys to, genius, and to the right you can see one of the two pen holders I added, also genius. Not genius: Punching a hole in the wrong side of the middle of the pocket so that I had to stick a rivet in there to cover the hole.

I stuck rivets on what I considered to be stress points, and also where the handle met the bag:

And I used my husband's old belt to make the strap adjustable:

[It's pretty much impossible for him to throw anything into the charity pile. "Yeah no, I might need that..."]

And when I say adjustable, I mean ADJUSTABLE. Look at all those holes! I want my T-Rex arms to be able to access this bag no matter what coat I am wearing.

And then I slapped on some tooling. I stuck my practice scrap on the front under the flap, with the magnetic snap closure underneath it. You can see in the very first photo how it was still skin colored, and when it stuck out under the flap it looked like a fupa. So I dyed it black. Here it is right-side up so as to best admire my fine technique:

It's got everything! Rattlesnake, veiner, cammo, stars, beveler, basket weave, swivel knife, three kinds of lettering!!

I wanted more tooling for the outside flap, but I had a hard time choosing what I wanted. So I just went with an initial, and then crammed every stamp I could fit in around it, finally dying it black and gluing/hammering/sewing it on:

That's right. I got a barbed wire stamp. How dope is that.

Y'all, this was a ton of work. And I'm fairly proud of it. I mean, obviously I'm shit at tooling, but it's enormously satisfying anyway. Plus I finally have a bag that fits my short, square, stubby-armed body perfectly. It's a miracle!! AND, ALSO, because I'm left-handed, shit is always on the WRONG SIDE, like buckles and clips, and I'M TIRED OF LIVING IN YOUR BACKWARDS WORLD!! HAHHHAAA, SCREW YOU, I WIN!! HOORAY ME!!!

Oh yeah, I took a shot with a ruler, so you can get a rough gauge of the size of my square torso:

I love it.

ZOMG, I ordered a side of leather from the Tandy Outlet. Here's how big a side is. Brace yourself:

Sorry if that's disorienting, I was half on the couch trying to fit the whole thing in my camera. The chair and the bar stools should give you an idea. O_O It's big. So much potential...

#ShittiestVegetarianEver

Now I've Discovered Leatherwork

So what had happened was:

Dragon*Con is such a major clusterfuck by now that the only way I can enjoy it is to sequester myself in the hallway where all the crafting demos happen. This year I watched a chainmaille demo, two leatherworking demos, two fabric distressing demos, and sort of a resin demo. Quick recap:

1. After the first hour of the chainmaille demo, many folks in the room still couldn't close a jump ring. They were in hell.

2. The guys running the fabric distressing demos were GREAT. Well, most of them were...I think one was on serious drugs. But I also learned about Worbla which is a thermoplastic, and stay tuned because I signed up for a workshop on THAT in November. The Russian guy sitting in front of me at the demo was a hardcore Worbla fan, and his enthusiasm made an impression on me.

3. The woman running the resin demo was dressed like Kara Thrace and looked a whole lot like her. It wasn't really a demo, just her talking about all the awesome stuff you can do with resin. I plan to stalk her at her studio in the near future.

4. The lady running the leatherwork demos was fairly unfocused and scattered, saying that she had until recently been in the hospital after having a car wreck and had been unable to prepare. So they weren't the greatest workshops in the world. But when she eventually got down to business and showed us how to wet and shape leather, and handed around some leather stamping, that was it for me. I was HOOKED. And I pelted her with questions, which she was more than happy to answer. My fate was pretty much sealed.

Tandy Leather and my Amex are now engaged to be married.

YOU KNOW I HAD TO GET THESE. And oh my god the alphabet stamps. I made this wristband for my sister-wife because she's a bad girl:

And this for my gym buddy:

This one has a lot more tooling than the first one, and was my first time using leather dye.

I made the next one for myself. I call it Soviet Bees:

I made a box:

DUDE. LOOK HOW DRY MY HANDS ARE. :(

And I took two bags of leather scraps from Hobby Lobby and Michael's and I'm piecing them together to make a bag:

It's almost done. I need to add an interior pocket, some rivets to reinforce the corners, and a magnetic closure, and I might add another tooled panel to the front flap. The tooled panel in the photo is my sample project that I randomly decided to throw on there. I later dyed it black to match better because when the flap was closed it looked like the bag had a fupa.

Friends, I have been looking forward to the day I would finally find my Voltron Project that makes use of all these skills I've been amassing. I think leatherwork might be the one: I keep supplies for different crafts separated into different train cases so that depending on what I'm working on, I can select the proper train case and get started. This is my kitchen floor during leather projects:

Clockwise from top center: Metalworking case (blue-gray); Rivets, Studs & Bedazzler (green); Scrap Rags (black pile on the floor); Rubber Stamps (clear); Leatherwork (yellow).

Shout out to my new Youtube Dad, George Hurst from Tandy Leather, for being such a soothing, practical teacher. And props to Ian Atkinson of Leodis Leather for telling it like it is, and for demonstrating 101 uses for the mallet. ("He'll use the bone folder to make that crease-- NOPE, WAIT, here comes the mallet again...")

If anyone has been keeping track, yes, I'm a 20+ year vegetarian. And I just ordered a side of leather from Tandy. Sure, I feel shitty about it! And I'm not even attempting to reconcile it in my brain -- I love animals, I don't want to eat them, I hate factory farming....but man, is leather satisfying to work with. It's like fabric, paper, clay and wood all rolled into one. It's indestructible, immortal, and biker vests and guitar straps are made out of it. BUT I CAN'T WITH THE LIZARD SKIN, TANDY. THAT'S WHERE I DRAW THE LINE!! :((

And I think the guys in the Tandy warehouse are onto me -- I used N.U.T.S.A.C. Enterprises as the return address for my order, and found this written under the shipping label:

To sum up: Leather is amazing, and I am a horrible person. A horrible person that maybe just found her Voltron Project.

Diggin' Through the Pile

I'm hopefully going to be unloading tons of "art" in the name of charity. I've been digging through the house and unearthing potential sale items. It's funny how much stuff I have put on the wall or on a shelf and then ignored until it all just became part of the scenery. Here are two of the things I found.

The first is a wooden mini-coffin. These things are great! I get them at Michael's at Halloween, stockpile them, and decorate them as the mood strikes. I sprayed this one with Krylon black primer and decoupaged Fangoria stuff on it. I also have a bunch of plastic bugs which I colored with a gold sharpie and glued to the box with E-6000.

The metal "nails" are Bedazzle studs that I nailed in with a tack hammer. His eyes are Bedazzle rhinestones that I glued on.

This is just all sharpie. I hope one day to be buried in something as fine as this.

Oh yeah, I have piles of those rad little skeletons, too. I usually get them at Big Lots and they come on a rope. He's a little too tall but I was able to squish him into the coffin.

The next thing was a Barbie box/purse thing (I need to find out what these are actually called, since I'm disfiguring them on the regular.) I started it before I discovered Krylon black primer (friends, those were dark times), so I just decoupaged a bunch of Fangoria stuff on it and then colored in pink parts with sharpie. It didn't work so great:

That's some weird useless hollow rubber skull on an elastic string. I have no idea where it came from, but it reminds me of the kind of thing that one prize ticket would buy you at the counter at Showbiz Pizza.

It's just flowers and sushine over at my place! Here's the inside. I left the ribbon saying "Barbie" because I really didn't want to replace it and I figured since the sharpie wasn't working out so good I wouldn't bother trying to color it:

I lined the whole interior with red duct tape, which is sort of working but also keeps peeling up around the edges. Then I added a duct tape pocket and a Fink patch, and the requisite G.B.H sticker. So critical. And I glued in some bat trim. I need to remember where I ordered it from because that place was rad. I'll figure it out. Anyway, this thing is a hot mess so it's going cheap.

If this charity thing happens, I'll post about it so everyone can come purchase my terrible shit "art" and feel good about themselves. I like to give back to the community.

"Damn You Krabs, I Went To College!"

I found a thrift store near my house that I haven't visited before, so I stopped in one day. It was kind of junky but I can always manage to find something in these places. This is a weird tote bag that has a reversible fabric liner inside, covered with a generic photo of the beach:

The back side of this is white, and the inside is denim. Predictably, the plastic part was filled with cat hair, and there were some noticeable scratches on it, but I cleaned it out with soap and water and threw the liner in the washing machine. Then I began the process of staring at it until something came to me.

In the meantime, I finally grew out of my Elvis tote bag (I have tote bags all over the house) that I use for my drumming stuff. So I bought a $5 canvas tote bag at Hobby Lobby and decided to cover it with patches. I dug out my patch collection, and lo and behold, I totally forgot I had some of these! I slapped them on the liner and decided I liked how it looked, so I ironed the new ones and glued the old ones. Voila:

Spongebob has spotted the skeleton-babe and, equally torn between fear and lust, has been driven to madness. Patrick's just glad to be outside and hasn't yet noticed that it's bat country.

If you look closely you can see a halo around the skeleton-babe shaped like an iron. That's because I thought "Well she's the same length, so I won't risk moving the iron around, I'll just hold it in one place for like thirty seconds on high heat. What could possibly go wrong?" I had hoped that the plastic liner would sort of obscure the burn, but judging by this photo, it won't. Therefore I have decided that it's an iron-shaped inter-dimensional portal that Plankton has rigged up to teleport the skeleton-babe into Bikini Bottom in the hope that he will break Spongebob and finally learn the recipe to the Krabby Patty. Of course he will fail spectacularly.

Finnishing a Tote Bag

Everyone knows that new hobbies require new bags. Right? Right. Once you decide on your Organizational System, you have to have some way to haul it around to craft meetings and airports and whatnot. Otherwise what's the point?

So here I am with my pile of cross stitch supplies -- hoops, thread case, notebook, sundries, fabric, Super Cool cross stitch book -- and no way to lug it all around! Wistfully, I wandered around the dragon-filled, uncharted aisles of Michael's in search of some sort of craft bag. They had the padded ones with wheels, the small blank canvas bags, those granny-looking basket ones...I was disappointed.

Then I spotted one of those totes with the photo pockets, into which one is expected to insert photos of puppies, chubby babies, and smiling families in matching khaki outfits on the beach. That shit sickens me. But as I choked back bile, I had an idea: There's no law saying it has to be puppies and chubby babies and smiling families in matching khaki outfits on the beach. (Is there?? I should probably check.) Couldn't one fill it with photos of, say, Finnish black metal band Sargeist?

And couldn't one affix a metal pin on the top identifying them as such? I decided to try. Thanks to my employer supplying me with google image search and a really good color printer (Patti, shhh), I was able to make this dream a reality!

I encourage everyone to purchase these photo totes and fill them with photos of whatever makes you happy! If puppies and babies and families in matching khaki outfits makes you happy, well, whatever. But if you find that idea repellent, and it is, put photos of disturbing images in there and TAKE BACK THE TOTEBAG!! We'll show those jerks.

Purses

I don't care what my husband says - you can't have too many purses.

This is one of the first purses I ever made:

I LOVE Deco-Ribbon. I made a bunch of little purses for friends and relatives out of it, and I decided to use all the leftovers in one big bag.

Other side:

I decided how big of a bag I wanted, then seed-stitched the panels and a handle and sewed it all together. (You can see where I screwed up the seed stitch in the green part.) Deco-Ribbon is very stretchy, however, so when I loaded things into the bag, the handle stretched so much that the bag was down to my knees. I put it away for a while to think about it.

I finally decided to remove about half the length of the handle. I did this by folding a good bit of the handle to the inside of the bag, stitching it down, and sewing a lining into the purse to hide the whole mess:

Oh, I also added one of my "Diana's Originals" labels on the inside. Those are fun.

Still in love with the ribbon yarn. I can't remember what pattern I used for this one, and if I remember, I'll post the info. Michael's had a huge sale on Moda Dea Ticker Tape one day, so I bought a ton of it. I love that stuff.

Behold the amount of stretch this stuff has:

That's a pound skein of Caron mustard yarn - and I don't know why this photo is so purple. But you can really cram stuff in that bag. I used this as my carry-on when we flew to San Diego. It held my wallet, phone, Security-Approved Denise knitting needles, yarn, pattern, snack, reading material, and a water bottle until I was forced to throw it away. The thing just keeps stretching.

Pattern: Stitch'n'Bitch Book (the first one), p. 169 "Chinese Charm Bag"
Yarn: Red one - some great hand-dyed cotton/acrylic I bought in Denver. Blue one - either the cotton I bought off Ebay and hand-dyed, or Patagonia, or Araucania Nature Cotton. I seriously can't remember. But it's great, whatever it is.

Aren't these cute? I bought those little Buddha charms at a scrapbooking store (not that you can tell what they are in this photo), and I've been putting them on everything.

By the way, I machine-sew all the edges and seams in the linings, but I always hand-sew them into the bag. Lots of people claim to machine sew the linings into the bag, but they're obviously not using my sewing machine to do it. My machine HATES that. It chews and growls and eats half the purse before I can wrestle it free.


This purse is knit using sliced up plastic shopping bags as seen on Knitty Gritty. I couldn't get a better shot of it, as it has no ability to hold itself up properly, so this sort of looks like a crime scene photo. I think it's a great purse, and it's fun to identify all the bags - blue printing for Kroger, green for Publix, and that strange yellowish blotch in the middle is a Home Depot bag. I think of this as "stunt knitting," where you knit with something just to see if you can do it.

Moral: Become a knitter and have all the purses you could ever hope for.