Let Me Be Your Etsy!

A few weeks ago, I agreed to go along with the crowd, and make a removable camera strap cover for my new fancy-pants camera.  Tinkerellen thought we'd all want to be like her and make some, too, (she was right), so she set up a kind of a craft-along and said that if we wanted to be super cool (and avoid her crafty wrath), we needed to complete our camera straps by March 31st, and blog about them by April 1st.

I was "do I have to commit to a deadline???" and my neighbor-friend, Kelly, was "in????" so we asked another friend, Emily, to join us for a sew-along at my house one day. Kelly brought (and used) her camera, and took some fun pictures (and one awful one of an unfortunate pregnant lady sitting near my daughter in front of a sewing machine, ahem). There were 3 toddlers, 1 baby, 3 mamas, and approximately 1,349,832 toys in the front room of our house. One sewing machine had never BEEN turned on (and, thus, the user didn't even know how to THREAD her machine!), one machine had some significant bobbin issues, and one sewing machine didn't have electricity run through it at all that day.

Oddly, the newby sewist (Emily) completed her goal (she scrapped the idea of making a camera strap and went with the much simpler bean-bag option) (which was not part of Tink's craft-along, but heck, she'd never even threaded her machine, so we can't fault her, right?).

And after our other neighbor-friend, Angie, fixed Kelly's bobbin malfunction, she was able to go home and complete her camera strap that afternoon (yay for naptime!).

Me? Well, I at least laid out my fabric that day! :o) And then I finished mine a few days later. Even though I followed the instructions (OH - here: removable camera strap tutorial), and I tried really really hard to keep my seam allowance at 1/4", somehow, my camera strap was REALLY snug.

It fits, hallelujah, but it doesn't feel very (tug, tug, shove, shove) "removable"!! :o)

I love love love the color combination of red and aqua, but I don't really love how the colors were combined here. I wish I'd added more reds to the patchwork side. Ah, well, lessons learned, right? Good thing it's removable, because, for all I know, next week I'll want one with blues and yellows! :o)

Honestly, it was a REALLY simple, and VERY completable craft. If I could sew quickly, I probably would have completed it (the sewing part, at least!) in an hour. :o) I know camera strap covers are the latest trend, and if you're looking to buy one on Etsy, but have your own sewing machine, you can TOTALLY make your own! And save about $23!!

Or you can give ME the $25 and I'll make you one!  Let me be your Etsy, Baby! :o)