April 10, 2012
It has been raining a lot lately other than the blissful easter weather… Sydneysiders will know what I mean.  There was stretch in which I wore my cute wee gumboots three days straight! Thinking about all the rain we had and that I was constantly carrying an umbrella got me thinking. Along with an umbrella, something I always carry in my handbag is an eco sac or a parka nylon shopping bag. It is tightly wrapped up so it takes up minimum room and it it very handy for not only carrying groceries but high heels home from work. With there being a relative glut of umbrellas and particularly those that are no longer in working order I resolved to resurrect an umbrella skirt and use it for an alternate purpose - an Eco sac.  I snipped around the top edge of the skirt to detach it from the metal shank in the middle, then I had detached the umbrella skirt ready to make use of. I laid the skirt flat with the outside facing inwards. I then just made a judgement call on how wide I wanted the bag. I ended up discarding four pieces of the skirt from the body of the bag. I kept two of these pieces and unpicked the seams.  I re-used these pieces to become the handles of the bag.  They were attached to the main body of the bag in the centre with the skirt edges together. It made a diamond shape with the triangle skirt section it was attaching to. From there, I just free form machine stitched the size of the bag that I wanted as well as making a tiny turn over seam around all of the exposed edges. I made sure I ran around the underside bag seams a number of times to reinforce them. The final component was pop button attachments to adjust how much I could fit in the bag. It has been pretty useful so far for smaller things. I am not usually a recycle type person but I am pretty proud of my green efforts. One less thing that goes to waste.

It has been raining a lot lately other than the blissful easter weather… Sydneysiders will know what I mean. 

There was stretch in which I wore my cute wee gumboots three days straight! Thinking about all the rain we had and that I was constantly carrying an umbrella got me thinking. Along with an umbrella, something I always carry in my handbag is an eco sac or a parka nylon shopping bag. It is tightly wrapped up so it takes up minimum room and it it very handy for not only carrying groceries but high heels home from work. With there being a relative glut of umbrellas and particularly those that are no longer in working order I resolved to resurrect an umbrella skirt and use it for an alternate purpose - an Eco sac. 

I snipped around the top edge of the skirt to detach it from the metal shank in the middle, then I had detached the umbrella skirt ready to make use of.

I laid the skirt flat with the outside facing inwards. I then just made a judgement call on how wide I wanted the bag. I ended up discarding four pieces of the skirt from the body of the bag. I kept two of these pieces and unpicked the seams. 

I re-used these pieces to become the handles of the bag.  They were attached to the main body of the bag in the centre with the skirt edges together. It made a diamond shape with the triangle skirt section it was attaching to.

From there, I just free form machine stitched the size of the bag that I wanted as well as making a tiny turn over seam around all of the exposed edges. I made sure I ran around the underside bag seams a number of times to reinforce them.

The final component was pop button attachments to adjust how much I could fit in the bag. It has been pretty useful so far for smaller things. I am not usually a recycle type person but I am pretty proud of my green efforts. One less thing that goes to waste.

9:51pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZI7rJwJQ2UNw
Filed under: useable