Project 23: Straw Clutch

I enjoy crafting just for the sake of it but every once in a while, I find a project that I personally love a bit more than my typical projects – these straw clutches and the straw beach totes I made later are one of them! I made these over the summer and gave them as gifts for summer birthdays and made sure the ladies of my family had matching beach totes. At the time I made them, I was seeing similar looking straw bags with pom poms and tassels at J Crew and other brand name stores for between 30 and 50 dollars so making these for under 10 dollars was so fun!

Quick project summary: Each year, Michael’s typically sells some type of summer clutch and matching beach bag in whatever type of material is most in style – straw, canvas, etc. They’re usually pretty inexpensive but very on-trend so I always like to take a peek in Michael’s in early Spring to see what they have set up for summer. For this project, I bought the clutches and then given that pom poms and tassels are trendy recently, I got neon tassels and pom poms and simply hot glued them on to the bags. And, then I was done. This legitimately is a 5 minute craft!

Things I loved about this project: I rarely make a craft that I feel is trendy or is something you might see at a store so I really enjoyed generating a “cool” end product. The process of making this was so speedy, too which made this a good craft that I could still do on a work night. I still carry my own clutch around and my friends and family that I gifted these to seemed to really enjoy. Additionally, in case you can’t tell, my cat also loved this project – I apologize to those of you who also received a bit of cat hair stuck to your clutch.

What I would do differently: I would like to retry this project adding on some interesting beads or buttons instead of the pom poms and tassels. The pom poms and tassels are a bit flashier and I think beads/buttons would make a more subdued but equally unique bag!

Things I also enjoyed while doing this project:

-Watching my kitten play with pom poms for the first time. You probably didn’t need all the photos of the clutches given how simple this project was but for my fellow cat ladies, I wanted to demonstrate that this project serves a dual-purpose as a human craft and cat toy. Note that since this project, miss Peach cat has become a pom pom fanatic and recently received 100 pom poms for her “gotcha” day.

-Laying on the beach in Cape Charles, VA admiring my tote