I LOVE LOVE LOVE this bag. the description says that is it hand crocheted. I may have to buy one just to see how its made so I can make some for my friends. plus my teacher collects coke tabs so she has literally huge bucketfuls of them in the classroom. (maybe if she saw the bag i could convince her to give me 200 tabs to make a bag out of :eyebrow:)
so anyways if any of you think you make have the slightest idea of how these are made, please give me a hint.
Carry it as a coin purse inside a shoulder bag or alone as a tiny clutch; it’s just big enough to hold your car keys, cell phone, cash and a lipstick. Hand crocheted with 200 recycled aluminum pop-tops. Comes with nylon fabric liner and YKK zipper closure.
Whoa! That is amazingly cool. I confess, I rather want one, too…maybe even enough to learn to crochet.
Just looking at it, I think a metallic silver novelty thread is used, looping in the tabs (that much, I’m sure, is rather obvious).
From playing with a crochet hook and a stitch holder for two minutes, I think it may be analogous to knitting with beads, perhaps threading tabs a few at a time and working circularly from bottom to top?
That’s clever.
I’m not an expert at crochet, but I would hold two pop tabs together, so that they are one on top of the other so the two holes would be aligned, and you could simply stick the crochet hook through, draw up the wire, and pull it through the loop to chain them together. Do the same in the next holes. Then you’d grab two more pop tabs, and continue chaining them together. When you are done, you can open up the two sides and lay them flat. On one side would be the crochet chain, on the other, the loop, like what you see in the picture.
Kind of like how you’d crochet the squares of a blanket together.
Does that make sense? :??
Oh, and you’d want a finer gauge metal wire, like jewelry wire.
If you try this, post some pics so we can see!
ETA: On closer inspection, I agree that it looks like some kind of stretchy silver novelty thread too. :teehee:
I don’t think it is wire myself. Looks like a silver yarn/thread probably with nylon. To me it looks like you would do as the previous indicated in holding the tabs together, but to me it looks like you would be holding 2 strands of thread together to get the look of 4 strands around each tab. Also on closer inspection if you look at the purse from the left to right you can see the tabs are over lapped the same way, until you get to the last three “columns” on the right where they over lap the opposite way, prehaps to make that side “rounder” You would definitely have to make it in two pieces I think. hmmm, love a problem, going to raid the recycle bin to find some pop tops. I don’t think mine have two holes though, I will have to look. I’ll be back.
I can’t tell totally from the pic, so I have to guess about what happens after you join any 2 particular tabs. Surely, you can join them by holding them together and just slip stitching around the both of them a few times, but you don’t want to have to cut the thread each time. So my guess is that after you have slip stitched or sc’ed around a pair of tabs a couple times to join, you just chain 2 or 3 behind one tab, then add the next tab and sl st around it and the previous tab. And continue on. Hmm, I have some silver metallic yarn I picked up in South Africa, 2 balls, no idea what to do with it. Maybe . . .
I can see a person crocheting this together it seems possible
Now i totally want to give it a try because it looks really interesting, plus, we drink lots of soda…i know it’s bad…and i could do a test swatch :teehee:
Mariblue’s instructions sound like they’d work well. I bet you could go to a bottle redemption center and they’d let you help yourself to the tabs. Would you need wire clippers to cut them free?
If you go to the original link posted on the bag, and then click the option to look at other tab bags there is a shoulder bag with a long strap, if you zoom in on the strap part it actually shows the underside of the strap or the crocheted side. Looks like all single crochets to me with a double stranded sturdy cotton thread in silver. I think that you just do a single crochet around two tabs together like you would add a bead, I really think it is a simple as that. I only have about 3 tabs right now, but I will collect some more and give it a try. I do not believe that are crocheting with wire, you would not want the underside of the shoulder strap crocheted with anything but thread, so it can rest comfortably of the shoulder. I will say that they must do someting to the tabs, mine have tiny sharp edges, so they must some how get rid of those without disturbing the integrity of the tab. Just my thoughts.
