Cindy Kuo
"Eco-coco-ture"
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Who is the perfect woman? To me, it is the mother that can do everything—the one who takes care of her children, always making sure they have what they need, encouraging them to do their best and seeing they are never without. Further, the perfect woman, if she needed something, would not have to take time away from her kids to go shopping. She would simply be able to find a way to obtain it—or make it.
With that in mind, I decided to see if I could make my purse from things “around the house.” First, I took fabric dryer sheets that I usually just toss away and quilted them together to make fabric for the purse. To give it some color, I dyed it with used teabags from my cups of afternoon tea. The purse straps are discarded cords from my son’s shorts. Even the lining is a found object as it is a plastic bag from something my husband bought me. The result is something functional for no cost at all.
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I wanted to make a purse that was made out of recycling materials - things I found around the house. My first idea was to knit with the plastic bags from the newspaper that comes into my house every morning. I cut them into strips and I knitted them together. I found that although I loved the colour, knitting the plastic was very stiff and hard on my fingers as the plastic was slippery. It also did not seem to have the type of body that I thought it needed. |
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My next
idea was to take the grocery bags & to knit them using the
double-knit technique - both sides look the same and the result is
two layers of knitting. I thought that this would give
strength and body. Although I did like the look, unfortunately I found that knitting with even the non-slipper grocery bags was still too hard on my fingers. |
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| So my next idea was to
take the fabric dyer sheets that I normally toss away and use them
somehow to make a bag. I layered them with about 7 layers and then
quilted them together. Next I tea-dyed the fabric sheets. Giving me the light brown look. I also tea-dyed the straps that I was using for the handles. |
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I then sewed the fabric
sheets together to form a bag. Before inserting the lining, I
sewed beads where the quilting lines meet.
For the lining, I used a strong plastic bag that had been used to bring something into the house. |
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