Sashiko Camera Strap: Sustainable Reuse

Hello!  Welcome to Curious Eclectic 🙂 This will be my very first blog! I do a lot of crafting, and wanted to have a repository for myself to document my projects as well as to share them with others. My first project will be a camera strap for my new Nikon 3500 DSLR.  I’m just getting into photography and while I am enjoying my camera, I hated the dinky, plastic camera strap it came with.  I knew this was a perfect time to practice some sustainable reuse with materials I had lying around unused.

Materials

While perfectly functional, I wanted something to reflect my personality and something made out of quality, long-lasting materials.  I also am big on reuse when I can, and I had an old purse whose lining was falling apart from years of use and whose style I had somewhat outgrown.  A perfect candidate for some sustainable reuse. I got to work with my seam ripper and deconstructed the bag and took stock of its parts.  I had some waxed cotton canvas with interfacing, thick quality leather and some brass hardware to work with. 

Method

My basic method was to simply make a rectangle, fold it in half, and sew it together. I made the base of the strap by sewing together the separate pieces of canvas to the length and double the width of the final strap. I left 1/2″ seam allowances on all the edges, with a final width of 3 1/2″ in mind for the finished strap. I eyeballed the length to be a few inches longer than the original strap.

Style

I wanted to practice my sashiko embroidery for this piece, so I chose a couple of patterns that I like and completed it at this stage before any more construction on the strap was done.  I used three separate patterns to reflect the piecing I had done to construct the strap, and only embellished half of the canvas – which would later become the outward facing side of the strap.

I won’t go into detail about sashiko, as I am a beginner and still learning about it’s rich history and techniques. For more information about sashiko and boro-mending, I recommend checking out experts, such as 刺し子 & Sashiko Story.

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One regret I had was leaving the interfacing in place for this.  Trying to run a sashiko needle and thread through thick waxed cotton and interfacing did a number on my fingers.

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Construction

The only further detail I added to this strap was a pocket. I had a magnetic closure from the bag as well as some leftover canvas that I wanted to use to create a place to store the lens cap when taking pictures.  The pocket itself turned out to be a bit too small for the cap but it will work for holding a microfiber cloth.

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I wanted a bit of extra padding in my strap so I added a piece of scrap cotton batting the width and length of the strap, turned the seam allowance under, and topstitched the strap closed.

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The only thing left was using the leather from the bag as bottom pieces of the strap connecting to the camera fasteners.  I drafted a template and used a small blade to cut out four pieces.  I then topstitched these leather pieces around the ends of the strap and the nylon fasteners that I scavenged off of the original Nikon strap that came with the camera.  As an amateur sewist, I didn’t use the correct needles/thread for this job, and in doing so broke two needles.  I may have to redo this eventually, but you live and you learn.

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Final Thoughts

Done! 

I have to admit I do love this camera strap 🙂 If I were to do it again, I would probably shoot for a strap width of 3″ instead of 3 1/2″ to make it a bit slimmer.

I’m glad I decided to finally make up my mind and use that bag.  I find myself struggling with sustainable reuse sometimes. It was a well made bag and so I hesitated destroying it, but in the end it was too used/dirty to donate and it would have just sat in my closet indefinitely. 

I hope you enjoyed this post and I’ll be back with more projects. Feel free to reach out to me with comments or suggestions, I love to learn from my fellow crafters! My next post will also feature sashiko with a focus more on boro-mending.