This blog entry could also probably bear the headline: "How Lady Ozma gets in trouble surfing the web for her Church callings."

Now I know you might be getting confused here. I can hear you now. "But Lady Ozma, just yesterday you said that your new calling at Church was as a camp type person. How on earth is a new camera strap dealing with camp like stuff?"

Well really, are you surprised? I can turn everything around to photography, right? I’m special that way. No, not that kind of special! Ok, well yeah, that kind of special. I’ll admit it.

There I was. I was being a good little Ozzie. I was researching great ideas for fun camp things for teenage girls. I thought I’d figure things out. Well, I started getting confused by some of the things I saw. What are all these binder covers for? You know, things like that.

And so my searching branched out. The next thing I knew, I had found my way to some blog entry where I saw a note on the side proclaiming a tutorial for how this person had made a wonderful new camera strap!

Camera strap? What? *CLICK*

You see, in my alter ego as JS shooting from behind the Emerald Lens, I dual wield Canon Rebels. I *heart* these cameras. They are like my third and fourth children. The only problem? The Canon Twins happen to look exactly alike in my camera bag. I end up having to pull a camera out and looking at the front of it to know which I am holding.

Different camera straps would be so very useful! I love it!

I quickly read through the tutorial, but it wasn’t quite what I wanted to do. And that’s where Google got involved. Tempting me away from my Halo Earning searches about camp. Oh no, I went selfish. But… it was camera straps! And crafty goodness! How could I say no?

About eleventy hundred tutorials, etsy shops, and a myriad of blog entries later… I decided to go for it. As luck would have it, a *few* years ago (ha! like I was gonna tell you how long? A lady never reveals her age!) I lived in Arizona and got involved in some charm swaps. I stashed away the fabrics and moved them from house to house to house to house to house to… oh you get the idea. I never knew quite what to do with these cute little 5.5 inch square charms. I have well over 100 of these suckers.

I whipped out my little stack and found six that *remotely* looked OK together and stitched them up into a nice long row. Six little charm squares into a strip. These were a hair too short so I pulled out a scrap from my scrap bag and voile!

<img ="http://ping.fm/w7Yqw">

I stitched this strip into a tube, with the seam roughly 1.75 inches out from the fold. Only I made it *slightly* narrower the first time. It took me nigh on forever to frog that first seam out. One would think that as often as I use that silly seamripper, I’d have mad dog skills with it. Not at all.

Finally, I finished my little strap cover and I slipped it over my strap. I’m sad to no longer see CANON REBEL all over my strap, but it’s kind of fun to have a scrappy strap instead! (Can you believe most of the blogs I read stated they made theirs to cover up that CANON REBEL writing? They apparently don’t like it. I say, flaunt the fact you have good taste because Canon is the best! That’s just me. Interestingly enough I refuse to wear a tshirt with a designer splashed across my chest. I know, I’m a little strange. It’s why you love me!)

So I went from this:

To this:

Isn’t that pretty awesome? Yeah! And I bet you couldn’t tell those were actually two different cameras. HAHA I didn’t take a before picture of the covered strap. I promise you that underneath that colourful strap is a strap exactly like the first picture. (The first picture is my old XSi and the second picture is my new T1i.)

Cost: FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Time: (not counting ridiculously long time to rip a seam) About 15 minutes.

**Note** This is very snug on the strap. Because the leather part is slightly wider, I wrapped it with a rubber band so it bent. This allowed me to feed the strap through the scrappy cover fairly easily. Just thought I’d throw you out a hint.*

Now, I have this guitar and I’ve always wanted a rockin’ awesome strap for it yet find myself rather un-enamored with the selection at the guitar shop. They seriously need to cater to us gals a little more. I’m forseeing myself looking for a most adorable and/or fitting to my rock persona nature charm square pack…

Now… what to do with the 17 Americana charm squares I found? Hmmm…

–Lady O