New bags

So I finally finished my fully colored bag. This is the pattern I made. The front would be mostly blue. I had made two rows of black for the sides of the bag but ended up changing that to three rows since the two wasn't big enough for my laptop.

 

Here is the front of the bag. It is quite bright but it's fun and i really like it. 

  

Bottom of the purse is two tabs to make it thicker.

 I put two handles on it rather than one so it'd be easier to open. The handle is two tabs thick.

 Side of the purse is three tabs wide.

Also I have a bunch of pop tabs now and some small skeins of yarn so I started to make a clutch. I think the smaller purses should really have liners so they will have to wait to be finish but here's my first one! It's ten tabs high and has thirteen tabs going across. I just crocheted the bottom together instead of adding a flat bottom.

 The clutch is about 4 1/2 by 6 inches.

These are really fun to make and I'm having a blast making my own patterns!

New Project

So last night I sorted all of my colored pop tabs that I got from Jordan Hamm. I placed them in their own piles then counted them out into piles of 100 and placed them on strings to separate them out.

 

I then made my  own pattern with some slight changes in Excel. 

And then started on my own laptop bag made from pop tabs. 

I was going to do all the yarn in black but then decided last minute to do a grey-blue color.

So first tie the yarn to the first two tabs.

Fold them together so they are lying on top of each other.

Pull the yarn through and do a single crochet (sc) twice into the same hole. 

Pull them apart and lay the next ones on top or underneath depending on what type of look you want. I like it this way better because the bottom has more metal to show. 

Fold pack together with the two new tabs in the inside and continue until your row has become the height you would like your purse to be. (In between tabs you will need to chain 1 if you are using yarn. If you use nylon you won't need to do this.

This is how it will looked when it's opened again. When you turn to start the next row chain 2 and place just one tab at a time.

Getting Ideas

So after looking at the purse and really wanting to make one for myself I've decided that I would LOVE to make a whole bunch and sell them at craft fairs throughout the summer. Only problem is that I don't know of many anymore. It's quite sad there used to be ones all over the place including at my home town but not anymore. So I'm looking for ideas, I was told by someone that Madison has one and I checked and sure enough it's the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I'm hoping to have a bunch by then but coming by pop tabs isn't the easiest. I have all these ideas and I want to get going on them...only problem is I don't have the pop tabs to do it with. In the past I have asked friends and family to save them for me but now many did. Oh well, I'll find some and maybe even after I've sold some I can start buying them...I know it sounds crazy to buy pop tabs but that's what I might have to do after awhile if I want to keep up with craft shows.

I'm Baaaack

ha ha reminds me of the movie We're Back...what a great movie I loved it when I was younger. Well Christmas came and is long gone and I did make a majority of my gifts.


Bridget - Chocolate covered cherries, and lavender scented bath salts
Jeremy -8 coasters (which I still have 2 of because they were still wet) and currently making 2 more because I missed some pets
Mom - chocolate covered preztels drizzled with white chocolate
Dad - I just bought him a jean flannel jacket
Aaron - Mom was able to make the wooden trinket box I was hoping to make for him
Jordan Hamm - a "Warning: I do dumb things!" Shirt   with Mom's YUDU machine
Nick Johnson - a "Warning: I do dumb things!" Shirt   with Mom's YUDU machine
Amanda Johnson - I wasn't able to make my gifts in a jar so Aaron and I bought her the game Life
Aaron's niece and nephew's got bought toys and other fun stuff

Well anyone one of the Christmas gifts on my list was a pop tab purse. I was able to get a whole bunch of pop tabs from Jordan Hamm, one of Aaron's friends and also a roommate of ours. I have tried all kinds of different ways to put it together. I tried wrapping wire, tried wrapping/weaving ribbon. Neither one worked how I wanted them to and was taking just too much time so I packed it all up around the middle of January and just stopped. Around the middle of last week I was searching the web for interesting purses and I came upon an old blog of a women who crocheted her purse and it looked AWESOME! I took her tips and red through the whole site a couple times so I knew what I was doing. I made my purse a lot larger than she did and the bottom of my purse is completely different. I also added some flair by putting some black yarn I had left over from a scarf.

My purse ended up being 26 pop tabs high and if you were to take it about 40 pop tabs long. The handle is 60 tabs long and the bottom include 19 tabs. If you do the math that is a total of 1119 tabs!! Insane but it looks awesome and I'm so proud that I was able to do this in only 3 days!