The Making of the Dragon Chalkbag, continued:



The fleece lining was finished off on top with a band to give it a proper rim, and to make a twist-closure possible. A magnetic clasp, covered with the last leftover bit from the original carrying strap, holds the closure in place.



To round it all off, the little dragon got a loop beneath one paw to hold a brush...



and a small clip hidden in the other one to hold on to papers, cards, or whatever might be there to hold on.



And now he's happy to take a ride in a bike pannier bag twice a week to hang out with his friend Ratthäus on the mats...



...where he is getting a lot of attention!

(And makes it easy for me to find my husband if we've split up for a bit. Just look for the little dragon.)

You might remember my "accidentally" turning a plushy toy rat into a chalkbag for bouldering? Followed by the lion plushy?

The lion plushy was actually transformed using several bits and pieces I had already bought for another transformation project - because obviously, at some point, the Most Patient Husband of them All also needed a fancy chalkbag. And by pure chance, I had discovered just the perfect base for this: A handbag from a costume/carneval shop. In form of a little dragon.



There was still quite a bit of stuff to do for the transformation, though. First of all, it needed removal of some of the stuffing, and alternative stiffening with strips of bendy plastic (intended to be used for corsets or crinolines). There was also the always-lovely and never fiddly task (hah!) of putting in a zipper so the dragon's tail could serve as a bag for holding a few small items.



The original handle was too short and too stiff, so it would have been in he way. Luckily it was also rather wide, so I could take it apart and re-stitch it in half the width and double the length.



Putting in the stiffening band at the top was the fiddliest part, and required a bent needle at the end. I was lucky in finding a nice gold tape to cover the plastic ring, matching the sparkly print of the original rim (and the tail and neck crests).

Next was the fleece liner...



...and the rest will follow tomorrow.

I have discovered, ages ago, that I work better with rules that are hard and firm and sort of blankety than with, hm, softer variations or guidelines. That is one of the reasons I blog every weekday (holidays and so on excepted) - it's much easier for me to remember it's a workday, and I'm supposed to blog, than to remember doing it every week or every  Wednesday or so. (Downside of it is that I have to blog every day, including periods where I have no ideas, not a lot of time, or both, which results in some short and boring posts and the occasional gratuitous cat or garden pic, as you well know.)

Anyway - those general rules do work for me better than squishy ones. So I do yoga in the morning, before I eat something. No yoga, no food. (I have the cat pic equivalent here, too: when there is little time, rolling out the mat and doing a few forward folds and a down dog or two totally counts. Don't you think I torment myself too much.) I do not buy garments made from or containing non-organic cotton. I do not have many of these rules, by the way.

But now I've made a new rule. Which I'm not fully sure about yet, as it can't be as blankety as the others, so I'm still in the fine-tuning phase. The rule is: No coffee without a pull-up or chin-up.

If that sounds weird, here's the reasoning behind it. Part one: I love coffee, and as there's such things as good de-caf coffee, getting too much caffeine is no reason to stop drinking it anymore. However, I love my coffee with milk, and if I go overboard on this... it is not good. I can stomach milk very well, but having five or six or so cups of coffee in a day will, sneakily, add up to quite a few extra calories. I actually managed to put on a little extra weight again, mostly due to milk-in-coffee consumption, which irked me no end and resulted in a short return to calorie reduction earlier this year. (I did not get above normal weight, though - I've been safely below that line since two years and a week ago. Hooray!) So. I want to keep on having coffee, and the option of getting my hydration partly, or mostly, through coffee if I feel like it, but it should also be kept in check somehow. A day of only coffee should be the exception, not the rule. This sort of begs to attach something to having a brew that makes it worth thinking twice, right?

Enter part two - I need more muscle. Or better intramuscular coordination. No matter what it might be (both, probably), there are regularly moves in bouldering where I just lack the sheer physical strength... and this sucks. It sucks even more because I'm rather small and often can't reach things, so it happens again and again that I'd be able to do a move if I could just pull myself up better with the arms. I've been complaining about this for long enough now, and yes, I do have a pullup bar installed (right here in my study door)... so I could, theoretically, do some training every day.

[caption id="attachment_3904" align="alignnone" width="640"] The bar. Looks harmless, right?


Sadly, I can be a very lazy person, and progress is sloooow in this, and not very visible. So, as a result, I am lacking a good incentive, and haven't been doing much.

Which will change now. Because coffee! I can have as much coffee as I want, provided I do a pull-up or chin-up before each cup. They do not need to be complete, but it's either a full one or to exhaustion. Which means that I do think some more before I go and fix myself a cup, and that I'm especially wary on Wednesdays as we go bouldering in the evening, and I don't want to be all worn out before we start. I'm not sure yet on how to handle weekends and coffee away from home... but for now, when I'm here, the new rule is active. And in a few weeks, I'll see where this brings me!

The inner bag is made from a bright green fleece fabric, consisting of a bottom circle and a fabric tube.



The upper rim of the tube has a stiff black band sewn onto it to keep it open. That whole thing was then stuck into the lion inside the foamed rubber tube, and secured to the bottom of the lion skin in the front and the back.

Then, a bit of the polywool filling went back in, at the front and at the sides of the little guy, to get him back into his rotundish shape.



As a final step, I sewed a band to the sides of the opening for easy carrying, and then stitched the fleece to the outer fabric in the front and to the pocket lining in the back. Two press buttons to close the top of the head when not in use as a bouldering bag, a bit of rubber string that helps the pocket lining to fold when closing the bag, and voilà - a very unique chalkbag:





When closed, it almost looks like before; the only difference is that the forehead is more receding now than it was originally - but that cannot be helped.

Can you tell I had a lot of fun making this?

Some scrounging around, and I got hold of a flexible strip of plastic that was large enough to bend into a ring - there was the necessary stiffener. After temporarily fixing it with tape, a few drilled holes and some kevlar sewing thread (yes, we have kevlar sewing thread, and it's really nifty!) make sure it will not fall apart in the future.



The ring is attached to the top of the tube with linen yarn and whipstitch. Of course I ran out of yarn three stitches before the round was closed...

Then it was almost done. Almost... but not quite. There's some nice, bright green colour missing, I think!

So the first thing the little limp lion now needed was some sort of lightweight stiffener for the chalkbag itself. Coincidentally, we had some foamed rubber lying around, so that got conscripted, cut into a fitting wide strip, and sewn together to make a tube.



You can see the lion is so excited about this that it has turned itself inside out! It was a very nicely made toy, by the way, with neat and sturdy seams all around.

The inner tube needed to be fixed to the inside of the lion to make sure it stayed in place. Some of that fixing was achieved with a few stitches right at the befginning, the rest was done by stitching the fleece liner to the bottom of the lion skin.

Next step was sewing and attaching a pocket to the inside of the lion's back. This also serves as lining for the inner back. The pocket is big enough to hold a phone, which is important as our friend likes to take his phone along and snap a pic or two when he's bouldering.



While mucking about with the lining, it quickly became clear that the foamed rubber will provide enough stiffness vertically, but that the opening would deform too easily... so some stiffening for the upper rim was needed, too.

You'll see that one attached... in the next post!

Last summer, I took home a plushy toy rat, and it miraculously turned into a chalkbag for bouldering.

A few days ago, a friend of ours, also a climber/boulderer, had his birthday... and just before the party, we found, by chance, this cuddly little lion in a shop:



It more or less screamed "miraculous transformation" at us. So our friend got a cuddly toy, and a voucher for its total transformation into a chalkbag. And this time I took a few more pictures of the things happening to it.

First of all, it had a little head surgery, opening up the seams on the top of the head, and then it lost its polywool filling.



Yes, all of it.

It was a huge bag full of filling... and then we had this limp little lion:



So. Things you want to have in a chalkbag? Space for the chalk itself, obviously; that should be some bag-like thing that closes off tightly to prevent dust from coming out, and should be fleecy on the inside, again to cut down on dust.

It also needs a handle of some kind to be carried easily, something to hold a brush or two, and some pocket to put in other small items.

Brush holders, in this case, were easy, as the little arms were already threaded with  elastic, so all I had to do was sew the paws to the body. The rest was a little more work... which you'll see in the next post.