In my household, we (and by we, I mean my boyfriend) drinks about 2 2 Liters of Diet Coke a day. We do recycle the bottles but I thought what if we could get a use out of them. Then I saw this challenge and thought that would be awesome to make a tote out of them. I drew up a design and discussed with my boyfriend how to put it all together, which he helped me a little bit and let me use his "Man Cave" aka the garage.
So here is the finished product. We had just gotten some snow so I took some photos outside!
Here are the bottles I started out with, I peeled off all the labels and got the sticky stuff off with goo gone.
Here are the clean bottles in the "Man Cave" ready to be cut up!
I cut off all the tops of the bottles which my girlfriend will use in the garden as irrigation thingys by each plant to help catch water.
So William and I were talking about different ways to put the sides together and I was going to iron them to fuse them but that was not working at all. He makes leather armor and had a ton of scrap leather and he showed me how to put in rivets. Here is his hidden stash of leather.
He drilled the holes in the leather for me to save time instead of hand punching it all.
And then we cut up the leather in small pieces.
Then I decoupaged foods from old magazines I have collected over the years. I had different themes on each bottle, desserts, fresh vegetables, breakfast foods, and dinners. (The dessert one is my favorite!)
I then hammered each rivet together to form the sides.
My boyfriend had a bucket of belts that people have given him because he likes the buckles so he said I could have one as long as he got the buckle. It was a really nifty belt.
It got too cold in the garage so I moved indoors to put the handle on and finish it off.
I stopped taking photos of the process cause I got lazy but I cut out a large piece of cardboard and covered it in some leftover fabric and took the same fabric and covered the sides and then covered that with a large piece of orange felt that I never thought I would use. Put it together with some zip ties and voila, I have my tote. My girlfriend plans of using it at the farmer's market this year. I did not buy anything to make this (besides buying the diet coke for William, which would have happened if I wasn't making this), everything was found in the house.
Here are some more finished shots.
