I’ve been thinking for a while that I wanted to up my camera game. Do something to make me want to carry it with me more – I am so guilty of leaving it at home because it’s so easy to throw my phone in my bag. Do something to make me love it more. And so I decided I needed a new strap. I had the XX straps on my Christmas list (but I got a holiday instead so I’m not going to complain! Really. I’m not!) And as I’m saving for said holiday I figured I shouldn’t go dropping close to £70 on a new strap, no matter how pretty it is! So DIY was the way forwards.
I popped up to my craft room for a riffle around to see what I might be hoarding that would be suitable to make one with. After working my way through my scarf collection and not being able to part with any of them, I found a meter of beautiful Liberty fabric that’s so silky smooth and has bright pink flecks and a piece of bright pink pleather (obviously) – I knew they would be perfect together! The only thing I needed was a way to attached the camera to the strap. After a little hunt on Pinterest, most of the tutorials I came across had you attached the camera with a keyring clip but that’s not what I was after – I wanted proper webbing straps to attach to the camera. Enter Ebay and some super fast shipping of these little bad boys! Once I had the bits I needed making the strap was easy. It took me about 20-25 minutes!
What you’ll need.
- Fabric the length of your camera strap (or longer if you’re wanting to make it sit lower)
- Leather or pleather for the ends of the strap
- Camera attachment webbing straps. I bought these and cut the clip ends off.
- Sewing machine.
What you need to do
- Start by measuring your camera strap. Mine was 100cm long. I measured out my fabric to be 3 inches longer than the strap so I had some fabric to play with.
- Now you need to decide how wide you want it. I chose to double over my fabric as the pattern was one sided. The piece I ended up with was 100cm long and 60cm wide. (If you’re using a scarf you wouldn’t need to do this)
- If you’re using one sided fabric and want it to be a tube, fold your fabric in half, right sides together and sew along the long edge to make a tube. I left the two short ends open.
- Make a template for the pleather ends of the straps. I drew round my camera strap ends using a flier I had lying about. Once I had the template, I cut out 4 pieces all exactly the same.
- Sandwich the ends of the fabric between two pieces of the pleather ‘ends’ that are right side out. Pin at the top to hold it in place.
- Insert one of the camera attachment ends into the bottom of the pleather end, and pin in place.
- Sew around the edge of the pleather. Making sure to trap all the fabric and the webbing strap. As I was using pleather, there seems to be a bit of sticking on my sewing machine foot. If I did this again I’d pop a bit of washi tape over it to reduce the sticking.
- Once you have sewn around the edges, sew across over the middle of the strap ends to further secure the webbing.
- Attach to your camera and enjoy.
See – easy peasy. And it feels really lovely round my neck too. And secure. That’s the main thing here isn’t it – I’ll be honest, I tested it over the sofa in case it didn’t hold so the camera would bounce – but it seems to be pretty solid! The hardest part was choosing the fabric to use.
What do you think? Would you jazz up your camera like this?
(sorry the pictures aren’t great – I’ve discovered the issue with having your camera in the pictures is you can’t use your camera! Phone pics will have to so. Ooooops.)