Christmas Gifts: Purses

School is over! And now that I have the time, I'll restart my posts by showing you some gifts I made for my sisters. It took me a lot of time since I made two little purses from technically zero. The most important material were magazines and I used the same technique by which these candy wrapper purses were made:

I always wanted one of those, but I'm a big color-order freak, so I hated the fact that all the colors were placed in such a disordered way (in all the stores where i've seen them they're like this)

Anyway, the idea of making these purses came to me a week before christmas, and obviously I had 0 candy wrappers, so I improvised by cutting lots of magazine paper rectangles with the measures of the original candy wrappers. Yeap, it was tiring, since I needed approximately 200 of these for each purse, but I survived ;)

After finishing with the cutting I had to cover each piece with contact paper, to give the purse a brighter appearance and more durability.

The pieces are upside down, that's why they don't look very colorful :)

Contac paper everywhere!

After all the cutting and covering, the next step was easy: folding and joining pieces.

Because of the repetitive movements, my hands got tired after a while doing the same step, so I went to another step, leaving me with all these unfinished pieces.

The bowl I was filling with the folded pieces

Then I decided to finish all the folding, to make easier finding the color I needed for the chain. After this, joining pieces was fun :D I made pretty chains intercalating white with other colors, since my final idea was a purse with a pattern of rainbow and white stripes.

Pretty :D (but I hate the flash reflecting in the glass :@)

I made five chains and then joined their ends to obtain five circles.

Now it was time for sewing the chains together. I didn't took pictures of this process, but here is the final piece after joining the 5 chains.

Then, I sewed the lower part of the cylinder together.

Last two pictures are for you to see the actual size of the bags. Now is time for the final step, which is to add the zipper. I added the zipper to both bags the afternoon of the 24! I didn't thought it would require so much time to make this purses :P (I started on monday), so I didn't took pictures of that step (I was in a rush).

Yet, I decided to add a keychain to the zipper instead of a handle to the bag, and I did took photos of these keychains.

This one is for the rainbow purse. My sister is a graphic designer (that's why her purse has lots of colors) and she loves animals so I thought this keychain was adequate enough, besides its cute and makes a good match with the purse :D

The second purse I made is black and gray, so this keychain goes with it pretty well. My other sister studied international business, so I thought of using more dark and neutral colors for her :)

I don't have photos of the final rainbow purse, I totally forgot about the pictures, but I guess you can imagine it more or less. However, I do have photos of the other purse completely finished, which is more important since you haven't seen anything of it yet :D

Après moi le deluge.

Hurricane Alex gave us a visit yesterday! As I wrote on my last entry I wasn't able to go out because of the weather, so I couldn't take any picture of the floods and, basically, of Alex. Fortunately, today I went out to the south part of the city, which I think was the most affected area, and took some photos of the Sta. Catarina River which carried a tremendous amount of water, it took away part of the adjacent streets, football fields, bridges, go-karts, a circus (which was evacuated a day before the hurricane, so no animal or person was hurt :D but I think the tent was taken by the flood, don't really know) and a market ): a huge market that I loved because of the antiques and cheap-old books you could find there. Hopefully, it will be restored soon. So, here are the pictures I took, just a few because I couldn't stop the car.

This river is wild

Chocolate rain?

Ok so, half of the river in this photo was dry land before the hurricane. Here is where the market, the football fields and the circus were located, along with some other stuff.

The clear side

The traffic was very slow when passing the bridge, all the people wanted to watch the river and take photos (like me hahaha) There were several persons in both sides of the bridge, enjoying the awesomeness of the river, which wasn't so full since 1988 (I think), when another hurricane hit the city.

Mud mud mud

Several streets were destroyed, garbage and mud filled sideways and the inside of houses and stores. I saw almost 5 underground parking lots completely flood with brown water ew. I counted 14 cars stopped in the middle of the streets and like 7 spots where the streets were damaged like in this photo.

Silhouette weather

It's raining, it's raining!! I can't go out. I can't take pictures of the floods ): and I really want to. So, I took pictures of random stuff with the sky as background, because it looks very clear and awesome. blablabla

Random plant

Drops drops.

Take pictures of water drops: Unsuccessful.

Leaves

Reaching green

Black feathers

Anti-rainbow

Pieces of red

Hanging from the sky

Moon, sun and wire.

Wire eclipse

Dalí

The key to the sky

Brushing