 Hi guys, how are you today? So today we're going to do a much requested and kind of long overdue belly band tutorial. Now this is my travel art case. This is the one I take with me when I fly or drive anywhere and this holds my basic watercolor supplies which right now are just this. I can just take this and I have everything to watercolor and do sort of field sketch watercolors while I'm on vacation. I'll show you one really quick. And also my journaling supplies for documenting my year, my life, and my trip. And I can fit everything in this case plus there's usually a little room for goodies that I've picked up for free or maybe if I've been able to do any art supply shopping which I really don't do a lot of anymore because honestly I have everything unless something comes out new or I run out of something. Anyway, the case itself I got at a vintage shop and I don't know where you would probably get one. It is a small leather suitcase. It's some sort of I think originally trained case or makeup suitcase. It measures about 14 this way along by 9 inches tall. By about 5 inches deep it is expandable. The lid is expandable as you can see there and it has a cute little handle with two clips and keys. I do have the keys and never use them. The belly band is really for decoration and also if I do gather a few too many supplies and it's really full it helps ensure that it's going to stay closed. Right now it's empty because I'm getting ready to go out of town again and when you guys see this you may see it while I'm on vacation. So when you see it I'm probably going to be gone already. Just because not that I ever check this when I'm flying because I do not check this ever ever ever but because I thought it would just be cute and should it get misplaced during traveling. God forbid I should leave it under the seat on the airplane. I do have a travel tag here which let's see I'll do that because it's got my cell phone number on it. I don't need that to be on YouTube but it has my business card inside of it and all of my information so should I forget this there's a way to identify it. I've got a travel tag on the case and it usually travels with me just like this and it fits under the airplane seat. Has never been a problem checking it through TSA. I always just make sure I have nothing that's more than three ounces in here and that I keep my watercolor kit that I bring with me fairly small. I have brought the Koi pocket sketch palette before and that one for some reason always gets me stopped at TSA and because they want to open it they want to look at it they still let me through but it always gets me stopped so they can look at it so I don't know. Alright so today we're going to do the, that's a little bit about the bag. Today we're going to do a belly band tutorial. Now I've already got one for this bag. I don't need one for this bag and I tried to find another little case that was similar to this one that we could do a belly band on. I couldn't find it. So I did have this other case. Now let me gather my supplies here. Okay I do have this case. Now this case is a vintage leather camera case. It looks like this on the front. It does have the original key, it has the original handles although if I were going to use this to take flying I think I would probably have the handles replaced or repaired because the leather is a little brittle. It could use a good coat of moisturizer, it is an antique piece, a vintage piece so I don't know how long it's been sitting in storage. The rest of the leather seems to be in good condition but the handles like have a crack here. So it definitely is a piece that I would make a belly band for in case the clip or something gave way and like I said I would probably take it to my local shoe repair man and ask him to make new handles for me. It does have this, because it's a camera case it's intended to zip down here. Now because this is a vintage case these zippers are really, you can open them, they're really stiff. Again you would probably want to wax them or lubricate them if you were going to want to use them at all. It does have two side rings for a shoulder strap which is long since missing but if you were going to use this case or one like it and you were going to have the handles replaced while it was there I would ask him to make a shoulder strap. This case really could hold everything. It probably is got about the same, oh see there's a random piece, I don't know what that is. It does have about the same I think usable footage space as the other case if not a little bit more. It has this, I don't know what that is for but I mean maybe you could put paper or something back there that you need to keep flat and it's a cute case. Now I'm going to make a belly band for this bag. Now when I do the belly bands I like for them to, the idea is should the handles give way or the lid pop open it still keeps the case shut so I like the belly band to go through the handles and clip around somewhere around the front. Now when I'm done with this this case is going to be listed in my Etsy shop for sale. If you're seeing this video and the Etsy shop is closed it's because I'm out of town. So as soon as I get back into town it'll all open it. You can message me anyway. Okay so we are going to make a belly band for this and if you know I'm looking at this case and if I was going to use this case for traveling when I had these handles made, remade I would probably also have a made maybe a little bit longer. This one's in good condition but this one has a crack in it. Anyway I have a little shoe repair man in town. I would probably take it to him and ask him to make new handles for me. Probably if you have maybe a motorcycle leather shop maybe they do repair work. They might be able to also put new handles on for you so look around and see what you've got. Alright I'm going to get my sewing machine out and reposition the camera and I have some painted fabric. I've got a few smaller versions of the clips that are on my other bag and we are going to use this to create a belly band for this bag. When I list this bag for sale it's going to be listed with the belly band we are making right now. But I want to give you guys some ideas. If you have a travel case that you are working on that you can make this belly band or you can also make these to hold your journals closed. There's a lot of different things you can use this for. Alright I'm going to get my sewing machine and I'll be right back. Okay so we've got our little genomy out. We are going to use it to make this belly band. You don't need a fancy machine for this. You'll probably want to put a denim needle or heavy weight needle on your machine because you're sewing through canvas, painted canvas. So this is a piece of painted canvas or duck cloth. You could also use denim and as you can see from my table surface I have usually a piece of this on my table all the time and when they get good and painy and inky which this one is just about ready then I pull it off and I do a bunch of stenciling and purposeful mark making on it and create something interesting like this one and then I use it to do things like making belly bands, journal covers, tote bags sometimes pencil bags. That's what this is a piece of and this one's pretty old. This is quite a while ago. Alright the first thing we're going to do is square it up because it's all funny shaped. So we're going to just cut a slit at one end and then it should tear on the straight of grain. It might be hard to tear because of all the paint. If you have collage on here which you can also do then you're probably going to want to cut it straight instead of ripping it. Bonus about ripping it is you get this fun sort of frayed edge which I love. And I of course don't throw these away because I can use the little pieces of that to make tags and things with. Alright let's do the other side. Alright now we want to cut it in half because this is not too fat to fit between the handles but it's not long enough. With the other one that I made I had a longer piece of fabric. This one's not quite long enough so I'm going to fold it in half and I'm going to just hold it and then I'm going to cut a slit at one end and hopefully it's going to rip straight but we'll find out right? Ready? Alright. Yeah it did. Cool. Now I'm going to take all these loose strings off and I take that back. These pieces we're going to need these so don't go anywhere with those. You're going to need a few small pieces and you might be able to use some extra from these long strips but if you don't have enough of your long strips then you are going to need those other little pieces. Okay so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to pick a couple of ends and we're going to just overlap them so that the two pretty sides are facing up. We're going to overlap them by about an inch and a half or so and I'm going to just sew a square around where they overlap, a rectangle I should say, to attach them together. I'm using turquoise colored thread because not only is it my favorite color but you guys are going to be able to see it pretty well I think so. I'm using a big stitch because you don't need a small one for this. Don't forget to go back and forward, backwards and forwards at the beginning and the end. Stop about a quarter inch or so from the edge and lift your presser foot up, leave the needle down and turn your fabric then sew the short edge. Again about a quarter of an inch away from the raw edge of the fabric. Needle down, presser foot up, turn, one more time, we're turning and we're going to go back to where we started, go backwards and forwards and then pull it out and trim your threads. You're going to have that, something that looks like that and that's attached to our two pieces of fabric together so now we have one nice long piece. You want it to at least fit around your bag to where it meets at the other side. Here's our bag and I'm going to move the camera back so you can see a little better. Hang on, I'll be right back. We have our bag here and what we're going to do is we're going to wrap our strip around the bag up underneath the handles and around to the front. We have plenty of fabric here to use so that's fabulous. On my other bag we have a two inch space where you have the strips here for the clips. We're going to put the clips on one end, we're going to cut these strips, sew them on one end with the half of the clip on it then we're going to eyeball it to put the other side on. I'll show you what I mean. There's plenty of fabric there to use. You want to make sure it at least meets here in the front if it overlaps even better. I'm going to take these leftover pieces. I've got this one nice piece I can use and I'm only worried right now about cutting at least two strips but if I can get four out of this piece that would be great. Again, I'm just going to tear it. I'm not cutting anything. These clips are smaller than the ones I used on the other bag so I have to rip these a little bit smaller so I'm going to cut them in half again and it looks like I should be able to get four out of these scraps. There's enough scraps that I need a thin strip and I only need three of them. I don't need four. I don't know why I keep saying four. I have three clips. I couldn't find the bigger clips when I went to go make this so I got the smaller ones. They're the same thing. Now before we do anything else we are going to sew a stitching line across here that will prevent it from unraveling too much. So let's do that before we do anything. Go back and forth at the beginning and the end and then cut your threads. Then I'm going to take our clips and I'm going to unclip them. I'm going to take not the fork part. You see that this part has like a fork? I'm going to take this part. I'm going to set the little forks aside. I don't know what they're called. I'm just going to call them little forks because they look like little forks. We're going to take a strip of our fabric and I think that we can cut these in half and thread it through our half of our clip. Like that. So do all three of them that way. I need one more half. Now you could sew stage stitching around all the edges of these strips if you want. I don't think you need to. I don't think I did on my other bag, but you could. That's up to you. You could also use ribbon for this. You want the clip in about the middle because you're going to fold it over like this and then we're going to sew it to this edge that we just stitched on. We're going to put one on each end and one in the middle and I'm going to put it up high enough that I can sew a little square right here. I'm going to start at this end. My only problem with a little genome machine is that there's no light underneath here. I don't know if I've mentioned that before. So it's kind of dark. Don't forget to go back and forwards at the beginning and the end. I got too close to the clip so it doesn't want to turn. We're going to do something a little different. Let's see. Nope. I got too close to the clip. Make sure you're far enough away from the clip so you can turn it easily without interfering with the presser foot. Let's try that again. That's easy. There we go. It doesn't have to be perfect. You just want it to be on there well. You don't have to sew in a little square. If you want to just sew it by just going straight across, we're going to do the next one in about the middle. I'm not going to clip the threads. I'm just going to loosen up the thread and then pull the fabric straight across and then start on the next clip. Let's see. I'm too close to the clip again. Let's see if we can make it work, though. Fabric one more time. We've got one more clip half to put over here. This particular strip has a plain side and a pretty side. I'm going to put the pretty side, the painted side up, loosen up my string. See, I got a knot there because I pressed on the presser foot before I was really ready. Now we have to cut everything. When you just travel from one space to the other, you get this string like this, which is the lazy sewer's way of doing it. Then just trim off that string that traveled between the two sections. Let's try that again. All right, we've got one more to stick on here. Hold your thread so you don't get a knot like that. That's part of the problem that I just did. If you go too far, don't be afraid to use the back button to go back to where you need to be. Of course, you can use matching threads so it doesn't show. Or you can use a fun color like I've used and then not care if it shows or if it's straight or anything. It just adds to the charm, right? Because we're a mixed-media artist, so it doesn't matter. All right, so now we've got three clips on one end. So now, before we do anything else, we need to take it back to our bag. We're going to put the clip end through the handles like that. We're going to bring the rest of the strap back and around. Make sure it's flat and not wrinkly. There we go. And you're going to eyeball it and figure out about... You want it to fit kind of tight. Figure out about... There's about an inch here of space where the clip is overhanging the fabric. And we want probably about an inch from the other cut edge so that the clips clip together but are nice and tight. So I'm thinking right about there. And I'm going to cut it. I know that's probably the scary part, right? All right, so again, we're going to put the bag aside. And now we're going to go all the way around all of these edges with some more stay stitching. Because this piece, unlike the clips, is going to get rubbed on a lot. And you probably don't want to continually be fussing with cut strings. And like I said, you can always put stay stitching on the little straps that clips are onto. You're going through lots of paints and things. If you've painted the fabric yourself, maybe some collage. If you've got collage bits on there. So don't go fast. And if you're using a machine like this little genome, it can't go fast. So that actually lends itself very well to this. I'm just using the edge of the presser foot as a guide for where to have the torn edge of the fabric. And I'm going to go all the way down to the other short end. We're going to stop with the needle again in the down position. So it's still sticking in the fabric. About a quarter of an inch away from the edge. The needle is down. We're going to lift up our presser foot and turn. And then keep going. Stop again and then turn and keep going. Alright. Now we can put our corresponding fork end of our clips on this other side. So we're going to take some of our little strips of fabric and do just like we did before and thread them through our clips. And again, if you wanted to, you could stay stitch these also or put glue around the edges like fray check, which is a glue made for fabric to prevent it from unraveling. The acrylic paint that's on here is going to make it so these are difficult to unravel too much because the paint will keep all the fibers together. This is a little easier if you can find the bigger clips. When I did my other bag, I found the bigger clips. Since I made that belly band, we had a fabric store close. So now it's harder to find them. Alright. So again, we're going to do painted side up and we're going to sew these down one on each end and one in the middle. Now, when you're cutting your fabric to do your belly band, you can eyeball it the way I did or you can cut it about three inches shorter than how it needs to be to wrap around and meet with the two edges at the other side. If you're going to use Velcro instead of clips, then you want to have the fabric overlap so you have room to sew the Velcro on. I'm going to do it correctly, hopefully. Again, you can just sew it straight across if that's what you want to do. You don't have to be this complicated about it. You could put metal hooks, you could put a zipper. Those are a lot more complicated and more expensive. These little plastic clips are not expensive. These little small ones I found at Hobby Lobby. The day I went, they were out of stock of the big ones. And again, our fabric store, other fabric store closed. We have Joann's, but they don't always have what I'm looking for. And I was at the other end of town the day I bought the supplies for today's video. So I'm just going in and I'm clipping all my threads. I had the traveling threads between the clips so I want to make sure I get rid of those. Now we're all ready to see how it fits on our bag. That's the wrong bag. I do have a video for the luggage tag and I will try to remember to link it in the description below if you want to make a luggage tag for your bag or some kind of identification tag. You just clip them together. And you have a cute belly band for your travel art case. And I don't know when I carry mine what gets more attention in the shape of my case but I have a big belly band to be honest with you. So there you have it. I hope it gives you some ideas of what you can do. You definitely can make these to hold your journals closed if you're making a fabric journal cover like my traveler's notebook journal cover which at this time you may not have seen yet but the plain one has, there's a couple different versions of it coming out. One of them is out already and I will make sure to link it in the description below but you definitely could sew the center of this of the cover before you put your journal in or anything and that would be really cute and then you would have a way to keep your journal closed. You might want to add a few extra inches to it in case your journal gets really fat. You know, mine tends to get pretty fat. Alright, that's it. I hope you find that helpful and useful and it gives you all some ideas. Remember you want about a two or three inch gap here between where the two ends are and where the clips fasten. This is about a two inch. You don't want it too tight because you want to know this is empty. Yeah, it's about a two inch. So this is empty and you want to have a little bit of play in it because if you're like me when you're traveling you're going to collect free things, maybe go art supply shopping and you're going to add more stuff to your bag and it's probably going to be more full coming back than it was leaving and so you want a little play in here so that you can still get your belly band on when you're coming home. Alright, that's it for today everybody. Don't forget to go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye.