The Great DIY Camera Strap Adventure

When I started browsing Etsy and seeing all of the lovely camera strap covers, I decided that I needed one. I care not a rip about accessorizing my body – I wear the same two pairs of earrings all the time on the rare instances that I wear earrings at all, and I only caved and bought a few scarves because my sister talked me into it. But a beautimous custom camera strap? SOLD!

Of course, there are a lot of things I’d rather spend my $20 and up on, so I just admired them from afar for, oh, about nine months. Then out of the blue on Wednesday – after I had committed to making “Pebbles and Bamm Bamm” costumes for the kids for Halloween – I realized those strap covers are just straight tubes! I can make one!

So off to JoAnn I went with Nathan in tow while Sarah Kate was at PT. First things first – I bought the fleece and felt I needed for the costumes. Then I perused the fabrics available to me for my one-of-a-kind custom camera strap cover. OH. MY. GOODNESS. It’s a good thing I only had an hour to kill or I’d have been in trouble.

I picked out an adorable green and pink daisy print for the top side and a minky dot for the bottom. I’d never seen minky dot for sale, much less tried to sew with it, but I was undeterred! For a tenth of the price of the ones I’d seen on Etsy (seriously a tenth – my fabric cost $2), I was going to have a custom camera strap cover, complete with a lens cap pocket, and I wasn’t even going to have to wait for it to ship!

My plan was to make a strap using this tutorial, but I planned to modify it slightly using this tutorial with a lens cap pocket. The bag that I normally carry my camera in doesn’t have a lot of room for a bulky strap, so I opted not to do padding or make it as wide as the one in the second tutorial. Once I mastered my first strap, I envisioned Straps For All Seasons.

And if you know pretty much anything about sewing and/or DSLR cameras, you’ve probably already picked up on Mistake #1.

Mistake #2 was my choice of fabrics. The minky dot was a pain in the butt tad bit difficult to work with when I stitched up the tube seams – the cotton didn’t give, the minky did give, so there was a constant tension between the two. Add to that the fact that I only bring my sewing machine out about three times per year (read: clueless!) and you have a recipe for frustration.

However! It turned out very lovely and it folds up nicely in my oh-so-stylish-but-very-tiny camera bag. It also slips on and off easily, so I can take it off whenever I want, and the minky is nice and soft on my shoulder. Generally speaking, it’s a lovely strap, except for one “tiny” detail…

…the lens cap pocket is WAY too small. Like, I can force the cap for my 50mm fixed lens in it, but just barely. None of my zoom lens caps will fit. But, in the interest of bringing sunshine to an otherwise partly-cloudy DIY Camera Strap Experience, I have found a great use for the pocket – spare battery! Now I’m off to work on Pebbles and Bamm Bamm…