Sounds like tons of fun. I would love to see pictures if you are able to
post them somewhere to have us see.

Lara

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"Kathy N-V" wrote in message
. giganews.com...

Bet that got your attention!

But it's not what it appears to be. The latest issue of Belle
Armoire (I think) and some of the teen fashion magazines and catalogs
are promoting interestingly embellished belts as a hot fashion
accessory. Manda and I were looking through her Urban Outfitters and
Alloy catalogs and saw two that she especially loved: one made of
what looked like an old seat belt, including the buckle, and another
with carbonated beverage bottle tops riveted along its length. (It's
called tonic around here folks, I can't bring myself to say the s*da
word)

So after a little while gathering materials and several false starts,
yesterday was belt day. Manda has a house guest for the next couple
of weeks, so we got two of everything, so everyone could join in on
the fun. Although I had planned to make some belts for myself, I've
recently discovered how uncomfortable a belt can be when you're stuck
in a wheelchair for any length of time. So I skipped making for
myself, and limited my participation to financial (no kidding) and
advisory (only when asked).

Bottle Cap Belt: This one was a blast for both kids, and turned out
not to be the problem I had feared. It has a cheap belt from a
discount store as its base in the appropriate size for the girl who
will be wearing it. The belt we saw in the magazine had what looked
like beer bottle caps riveted along the length of a wide black
leather belt. That's not appropriate for my kids, both because of
the beer caps (which are inappropriate for kids too young to drink)
and because they were attached loosely, so as to make a jingle when
the wearer moved. Noisy belts are not what I think should be worn to
school. I decided that the belts were stiff enough that the bottle
caps could be glued in place, assuming we could find some good ones.

We had just about decided to get a bunch of bottles of Coke and Pepsi
and drink them up, when I spotted the coolest bottle caps in the
scrapbooking section of our big craft store (A.C. Moore) These had
oodles of fun designs, which probably never got near a beverage in
their lives, as well as blank ones you could paint yourself. I was
all set for the blank ones, but the girls liked a bunch of the retro
looking printed kind. Fine by me. At $3/dozen, the caps cost just
about as much as the Cokes in bottles would have cost, but the caps
wouldn't have been nearly as cool. We bought two dozen caps.

Bob took the girls to a discount store, where they bought the
appropriate belts for $2.97 apiece for some substance called "bonded
leather." I assume it's something along the line of reconstituted
turquoise: floor sweepings from a leather factory mixed with a
binder and rolled out to use like the real thing. The top layer of
the belt was actual leather, so they did look good, and should wear
reasonably well (see below)

We measured the belts and decided the area to be embellished should
be mostly in the back, so the buckle and tongue of the belt wouldn't
be hindered by the bottle caps. To copy the store bought belts, I
could have used Pop Rivets (I have a rivet gun in the garage), but I
didn't want anything that pokes a hole in the middle of those cute
printed bottle caps, and it would leave the jingling cap problem.
When we opened the packages of bottle caps, they had foam things with
adhesive on them. We decided to use the heavy duty glue dots to glue
the foam into the bottle cap, and then the bottle cap onto the belt,
at an interval that had ten bottle caps along the belt. This turned
out to be not quite as sturdy as I liked, so we used a little two
part epoxy the next day, and those bottle caps aren't going anywhere.


Part of why the belts were so cheap was the buckle . The belts had
large buckles with a lurid, gross faux turquoise cab in the middle.
It was such a jarrindg shade that it looked almost like it lit up and
along with the large buckle, made the wearer look like she had a huge
waist, which is not the case in the least. Anything that makes a
size 6 person look fat is badly designed. Happily, I have many tools
to solve such problems. That plastic stone was gone in oh, about a
second. Even better, a bottle cap fit nicely over the bezel for the
cab.

It took the girls about an hour to do this, mostly unaided by me.
Probably 95% unaided by me, and it would have been completely unaided
if I had wanted to be a hard guy. When they wanted to know how to
measure the belt's "working area," I could have given them a tape
measure and told them to figure it out. But it's hot, and this is a
fun project, not a math project (and although the two can intersect,
this wasn't one of those times). It took me about a second to show
them how each belt needed different spacing, because they were of
different sizes. They took care of the rest, including swapping
bottle caps so each had the ones they liked the best.

The scrapbooking section also offered mini bottle caps with letters
on them, rather like Scrabble letters. Manda's friend chose those in
addition to her vintage full sized caps. She put her name in bottle
caps inbetween the larger caps, which created an interesting,
attractive effect. We bought a couple of sets of Scrabble tiles at
the scrapbooking section as well: one to replace the missing tiles
in our sad Scrabble game, and the rest for a project we haven't
thought of yet.

Then they simply glued the bottle caps in place, and we weighted them
overnight on my kitchen table, while the glue cures. (Cinder blocks
look strange on a kitchen table, but this certainly isn't the first
time) Then they started on Belt #2

Seat Belt Belts: These are HUGE around here. It's just a length of
1970's era lap belt with the metal release (not the black plastic
with the orange button of today's seatbelts) Most have an auto logo
in the center of the buckle part, and some have a design in that
little square (often something goth). The thing that struck me is
that they were charging $30 and up for a three foot piece of
discarded seat belt webbing and "recycled vintage" (read "gathered at
junkyards for next to nothing") buckles.

My days of climbing over old cars in search of parts at a junkyard
are long gone, so much so that I am shocked when Bob tells me that
most places don't even allow you to go out and strip a vehicle
yourself, for insurance reasons. So, I went to the next best place:
a local auto body shop. An old friend from the neighborhood owns
one, and I asked him if he had some old seat belts for me.
Shockingly, he turned me down flat.

I asked why, and it was because of (ahem) insurance reasons. He was
worried that I'd buy webbing from him, put it in my car (rather tough
since I don't even have a car right now), and get into an accident
where the belts fail. I suppose that's remotely conceivable, but
it's not at all likely. When I told him why I wanted the webbing, he
was fine, and gave me two 90" pieces, in exchange for a note saying
it wasn't going to be used as safety equipment in any vehicle.

Making these was simple, although hand sewing them was a giant pain.
I had the girls use the fattest Fireline I own (50 or 100 lb weight
in smoke) I cut off the right length from the end with the buckle,
and then sewed the tongue to the raw edge. One hint: Fray check is
your friend in this project, as is a thimble and a pair of pliers.
Because I was hand sewing, I ended up having to use a heavy curved
needle and an awl to go through all that stuff. Instead of leaving
the buckle 100% plain, we went back to the scrapbooking aisle: they
had little plastic adhesive bubbles that have a retro photo molded
into them. Six buttons for $0.99, on sale. Making my entire out of
pocket expense for this one to be $0.50/finished belt, plus some very
sore hands from pushing the needle through the webbing. But the
belts were worth it. They look absolutely gorgeous.

Lastly, the girls wanted some accessories that were listed as "must
haves" on one of the teen fashion sites. Manda called me over to the
screen, to see if I could figure out how to make cell phone charms
(they want $30 and up), purse charms ($20-$50), "designer watches"
(sky's the limit, even for plastic) and wide crystal cuffs (the ones
they liked were about $200). Manda and her friends know that getting
that kind of money out of me is ahem, rather unlikely.

I sent them over to my box of Czech pressed beads and Peruvian
ceramic beads and had them each pick out a couple of focals;
suggesting that they stick to one theme for both the cell phone and
the purse, since they'll be together. I also dug out a sheet of
"shrinky dink" plastic. (Great name for that stuff. Sounds like you
need Viagra to make it work) I printed each girl's name and address
on the plastic, cut it to the approximate size of a business card and
punched it with a paper punch. Then I shrunk it and set it aside.

Manda's guest picked a set of Peruvian ceramic hedgehogs as her
focal. The cell charm was the hardest, but only because I didn't
have small hedgehog beads. After many tries, she now has a hedgehog
school ID lariat, a hedgehog purse charm, and a wolf cell phone
charm.

Upon examining the cell phones, it was easy to find a slot or hole in
each that was perfect for running a piece of beading wire through. I
ran a 6" or so doubled length of 49 strand softflex through the hole,
and put some tape on one end as a bead stopper. Because of the large
hole in the ceramic beads, I put those on first. The girls then
picked out some 4 mm crystal bicones and matching 8/0 seed beads (the
11/0 ones disappeared in this project - you needed something bigger).
they strung about 4" worth, leaving me room to double crimp the
wires and hide the crimps inside the ceramic bead.

These charms are not removable by design, but you could put a little
lobster claw clasp/split ring combination in there somewhere if you
chose. The purse charms were made in exactly the same way - even the
same length. Ooops - I forgot one thing. On each set of charms, I
put the shrink plastic ID on the wire before I crimped it. It would
be a long shot to get the stuff returned if one of the kids lost it,
but a name tag would be proof of ownership should they spot another
kid with their cell phone.

The ID lariats were simple Y necklaces, with a ceramic bead at the
junction of the Y, and a huge sterling silver lobster claw at the
termination of the dangle. (We've tried everythng, and that's the one
thing that lasts the longest for the kids I know) The necklaces are
long enough to fit over the girl's heads. These were made with 6mm
druks rather than seed beads, so the druks would be the part against
the skin, instead of the bicones. Manda is still very sensitive to
scratchy things.

Today's project is to have "someone" make a whole bunch of wheels
made of crystals in triangle weave, which can then be made into wide
cuff bracelets. If I have any spare time, they've picked out
cartoons they'd like me to copy in beadwork, so they can glue them to
denim purses they bought. If I tie a mop to my *ss, I can sweep the
floor at the same time and really be useful. :-)

But all of these projects are suitable for teens, and right up to the
minute as far as fashion goes. It's also one of those great times
when made at home produces a product that inspires envy among
classmates instead of "awww, you were too poor to buy it?" The belts
are going to be especially popular, because I saw nearly the same
thing at the store in the mall. The seatbelt one was $180, and the
bottle cap one was over $100 as well.

Manda had charms on her things last year, and they were admired by
all the kids; because she was able to pick whatever characters she
liked instead of whatever was available at Claire's that week. I
even made a tiny eyeglass charm to replace a screw on her eyeglasses
one morning when she forgot to tell me the glasses were broken until
five minutes before it was time to leave. (a 4 mm bicone on a
headpin, pushed through the holes and made into a wrapped loop. Use
as many wraps as necessary to tighten connection between lenses and
arms of glasses. constant cursing required)

If I can, I'll take and post some photos.

Kathy N-V