4/18/2012 - Woven Rubber Handbag

I know this sounds pathetic for a woman to say, but I hate carrying a purse and always try to make sure that I have pockets to put my stuff in. Even though I don't carry a purse, I love making and designing purses and bags.

Reclaimed Material: rubber inner tubes
Other Material: decorative brads
Tools: scissors, cereal box, X-acto knife

How I did it: I cut six strips of rubber 24" long and about 1.25" wide for the horizontal pieces, five strips about 20" long (same width) for the vertical, and one long piece 2" wide for the sides and the base. I took one whole tube and carefully cut the valve stem off. For the horizontal pieces, I cut slits on one end and tabs on the other to make loops, then closed them around the cereal box. I used the fatty strip of rubber and wove it along the short sides of the cereal box for the base and sides of the bag. I folded the whole inner tube in half and wove the sides through each side of the cereal box and made sure the handles were even. I wove vertical strips through to the top working around the handles. To hold the handles in place, I inserted six small brads into each square along the handles.

What I would do differently: As you can see by the pictures, this bag isn't complete. I tried many variations of this and my original thought was to use whole inner tubes by twisting them to size for the horizontal pieces and whole tubes cut to size for the vertical pieces. That didn't work, so I sliced open the vertical pieces...still not quite right, so I took the whole thing apart and did what I explained above. I wasn't loving the way it was turning out with the brads, so I gave up on this...plus I didn't want to invest even more time into a piece I didn't really love. My mother-in-law liked it though so I should probably revisit this another time. I would like to add a fabric liner to it and maybe some sort of closure.