I've never had a penchant for working fabric, it's always proven to be to frustrating for me to really dig into, and I suppose I never had a project idea that excited me as much as this one did. My partner and I recently got back into climbing after a very long hiatus, and our gear, while dusty, was still functional. While at our local rock gym we spotted several climbers with more interesting chalk bags, and it struck us that we could easily whip up our own. With some encouragement from Ouliana, we set off to Jo-anns with a beat up old bag to use as a prototype, and left with the fluffiest bag I've ever seen.
Ouliana's bag came together in one evening, with fairly simple construction, as she's already great at sewing. It basically consists of a bag nested inside a very slightly larger and fluffier bag, stitched together at the top edge with a grommet and cord to cinch it closed. The fluffy material presented issues with getting good seams until we started "shearing" off the excess fluff at the edge, and any cutting of that material quickly filled the air with stray fluff. The eyes were surprisingly easy, as Jo-anns sells pairs of snap-in plastic eyes fairly cheaply.
It took a long evening to tackle mine, though we'd ironed out all the steps and snags in the first pass. Hand-stitching the felt bits together to form the sloth-face easily took an hour, but by the end I was totally comfortable with the process. I did end up going with a simpler white felt lining, but adding the arms was a new complication. Ouliana was nice enough to take the helm on a two of the more involved stitches on the sewing machine, but allowed (er, insisted) me to do the rest. As my first real project out of a sewing machine, I'm super thrilled with how it came out!
