How to make a cute toy camera strap

I’ve been wanting to post more DIYs and recipes for a while, but I keep pushing them back in favour of telling stories! Every now and then I’m going to be adding in a Tuesday post about something hands on, and today is one of those days… Hope you like it!

kr.

I’ve been fascinated by lomography for some time now, and I thought that our trip was the perfect reason to make the leap and have something a little more lo-fi to play with. I bought a Diana F+ right before we left and wanted to give her a little more flare for the trip – this is how you can make a fancy strap for your toy camera too!

Supplies:

- Two lengths of thin ribbon (I used 52″)
- A glue gun
- Four buttons
- Binder clips and paper clips as needed
- a heavy book to anchor your strap

Start with a shiny new toy camera, that is just begging for you to mess with it. Only slightly, I promise.

Choose and cut two lengths of a thin ribbon, for mine I cut 52″ of each and then trimmed the extra at the end. Remove the strap from the camera, then lay the ribbon on the outside of the camera strap and use a small binder clip to secure them together:

Flip the project over so the outside is facing up, and pop a heavy book on top of the tail end of the camera strap to keep it from getting any ideas about the process. This will allow the ribbon to move freely around it without being tangled.

Start to wrap the ribbons around the strap one at a time, letting them cross each other at the spacing of your choosing.

When you get halfway finished, pop a paperclip or binder clip on one of the crosses. The ribbon tension will be a little slippy, so this lets you adjust when you’ve finished the next half without the project becoming unwieldy.  Continue wrapping the ribbons until you reach the end, then slip a paperclip on just above the last place where the ribbons cross.

Adjust! Things may have slipped around while you were working, so make sure both sides are spaced out how you want them to be and that the first and last ribbon crosses are approximately parallel to each other. You don’t want to look lopsided, afterall.

Starting at the centre point of the strap, then moving to the ends, add a small dot of hot glue on the camera strap under one of the crosses, and anchor the ribbons in it. On each end, cut the tail ends of the ribbon off and add small buttons with hot glue to hide the ends.

This is a fast, fun cute-ification project that is easily undone with no harm to the strap.

And yes, my diana & I are having a lot of fun, as you can probably tell. :)