Licence Plate Purse

I won’t say this bag is illegal, but if you happen to meet a policeman while wearing it, sidle away slowly then run like the cops are chasing you. Which they might be.

I refused to hand the plates in when my darling was sent to the wreckers. Originally they were part of the memorial wall, but gluing them to the new Wayne letters didn’t seem particularly practical. There are dozens of different projects out there, but I had my heart set on a handbag. This way he could still go everywhere with me, and it was about time I carried him instead of the other way around.

I got the initial inspiration from NynaeveAS’s tutorial. Her bag is fancier than mine: I didn’t want any trimmings to distract from the glory of Wayne. We had to make do with two licence plates rather than three, since as unique as Wayne was, the standard number was all we had to work with.

1.      The plates are 38 cm long. The first needs to be cut at 24 cm (for the front and bottom), leaving a second piece 14 cm long (for the top). Mark a pencil line and cut it with sidecutters.

2. The second plate forms the sides and the back, and doesn’t need to be cut, but needs to be marked 12 centimetres from each end. Put the plate in a vice and bend it along the marks. The paint will flake a little along the bend, especially if your car was forty years old. Also bend 2 centimetres from each end, making the sides 10 centimetres – this creates an overlap with the front to attach pop rivets.
3. Take the 24 cm (bottom and sides) piece of plate and bend it 2 centimetres from the edge, and another 10 centimetres from that bend. Bend the 14 cm (top) piece at 11 centimetres – the extra three centimetres will hang down the front of the purse.
4. The three pieces fit together like this:

5. Don’t drill the holes for pop rivets before you bend - unless you happened to drink felix felicis lucky potion this morning, your holes probably won’t line up. We put four pop rivets on the front, one each side top and bottom, and two at the back, one each side.
6. Attach the hinges to the back plate with pop rivets. Rest the top piece on and mark where the hinges are, then file the plate between the marks to create a hinge-sized space for them to fit snugly into – otherwise the whole top will be pushed forward and you’ll have a gap the width of the hinges. Drill hole and pop rivet the hinges onto the top plate.
7. Cut the vinyl strap to the desired length and melt or punch a hole in each end. Attach in the middle of each side with a pop rivet, using a washer inside and outside to prevent it pulling through.
8. Line the bag with vinyl: you could just cut and glue each section, but if you have a handy slave to hand-sew it while you sit and work on your Corporations essay, by all means take advantage of him.
9. Practice your modest smile: you’ll get endless compliments every time you take it out, so make it convincing.

I’m well aware that the fluoro purple dog leash doesn’t precisely match the rest of the purse, but I kind of like that. I feel as though Wayne would approve.

Waynification

Short of crashing it into a tree then setting it on fire, there was no way I could really make my new car look like Wayne, but I at least wanted to make it a little easier to pick out in a parking lot.

DASHBOARD COVER

 

When Mum had the audacity to suggest that perhaps I didn’t want the most expensive material in the store for a dashboard cover that was going to sit in the sun and fade, I tore into her like a starving man at a smorgasboard. Two months later, I sat bolt upright at 2 a.m. exclaiming “Why didn’t I buy cheap material for the bottom and use the print for the top?”

When I called Mum to query why she didn’t point this out at the time, she chose to plead the fifth, cheerily disregarding the fact that we don’t actually live in America.

I didn’t want to recover the old one, since I may actually want to sell the car to somebody without the same passion for classic literature, so I laid it on a long roll of butcher’s paper and traced the outline to make a pattern and cut out two pieces of material. Wadding falls apart easily, so I didn’t sew the back and front together and then insert it, like a cushion insert: I laid the two pieces of material right sides together with the wadding on top, and stitched all three together, leaving a small gap to turn it right side out and handstitch it closed.

I bought the thickest wadding I could find. This was a mistake. It’s kind of like having a giant, flat stuffed animal in front of your windscreen. If I was doing it again, I’d use thinner wadding and sandwich it between a couple of pieces of stiffener – I don’t think stiffener alone would be thick enough.

Another discovery was that you get to look at it even more than you expected, because the windscreen reflects the pattern. It’s always there in front of you, like a strange mirage. 

HEAD REST COVERS 

Creating the pattern was interesting, since I had to stab pins into the headrest like nails to hold the paper in place while I traced each section, rolling it as I went to get from the underneath of one side to the other side. I did have the foresight to mark the paper with front, back and top sections, so cutting the material was easy (adding a couple of inches as seam allowance, of course). The actual sewing part was…more interesting.

I’d never sewn on a curve before, at least not without Nan to supervise, gradually get impatient then do it herself. I was laying the pieces of material out flat and trying to get the edges to line up so I could pin them together, and it was not working. Eventually I put the material on the headrest cover, right side down, and pinned along the top of the curve, then took it off before it got stuck and pinned the rest. From there it was just a matter of stitching the raw edges together.

Getting the covers on was like trying to dress a particularly wiggly five year old in a two year old’s clothing. Slipping it on from the top down didn’t work: I had to get one corner in then work the material over the top to the other side. Obviously, I had to leave the underside unsewn, so the material at the bottom was still hanging down. I will never confess to Nan or Aunty Barbara that I hate hand stitching so much that the bottom of the headrest covers are held together with duct tape.

STEERING WHEEL COVER

I followed this tutorial, but let’s face it, a steering wheel is a giant circle: there’s only so many variations of how to make a cover for it. I hadn’t realised just how visible the interior of the cover would be: I think I expected the elastic to be magnetic and seal the edges together. Next time I would probably line it, or at least pick a material with a decent backside. No, I don’t mean material with a Betty Boop print. 

CD VISOR

Clearly, Justin Bieber wasn’t doing a good enough job of driving people insane and so God decided to invent bias tape. Behold and admire the CD holders, since they are the first and the last things I will ever make with the horrible stuff.

The tutorial from Puking Pastilles was very clear and detailed, but it kind of glossed over exactly how thick the project gets: by the time I’d reached ten layers of fabric with interfacing plus elastic, the bias tape I’d bought was too thin to wrap around it and my sewing machine had declared its intention to pack up and move to Hawaii.

GEARSTICK COVER

This project started with ripping the gearstick cover to pieces (which makes it sound like I used bare hands and brute strength, but actually I used a Quick Unpick). Cotton alone would have been too flimsy, but I didn’t see the point in replacing one plain boring leather cover for another plain boring leather cover, so I decided to take it apart, glue the new material to the old material and put it all back together again. I only removed the top section and tore out one seam, but working with the cover flat let me wrap and glue the material around the bottom without the elastic scrunching it, and sew straight lines along the seams I wasn’t unpicking. It would be possible to do it just by gluing, but it might not have held its shape as well.

With blithe disregard for the fact that they didn’t match anything, at all, in any sense, I cut each end off the shoelaces from my Batman Converse, stitched the two sections together and fed it through as the cord.

It took me three tries to get the Velcro sewn back on close-enough-to-properly. If you’re going to take something apart and then try to recreate it, for the love of god take proper photos of it first.

CUP HOLDER

 I really should have taken a photo of the cup holder before I took it off to spray paint it, since I couldn't figure out how to put it back together again.

WINDOW WINDER COVERS

They’re literally just a circle two inches in diameter wider than the window knob, with a piece of elastic sewn in. (Well, I needed something else that matched my pirate duck.)

 Some kind of tacky plastic animal is an old Wayne tradition, though the ducks automatically lose by virtue of not being blueberry-scented.

POCKET ORGANISER

Originally I was going to make the organiser for the car so I had somewhere to dump my wallet and phone, but since the CD visor freed up the console for that, I stuck it on my bedroom wall instead. It probably would have turned out a lot better if I hadn't been in a 'I do not measure things or pin things!' mood. Also, I ran out of stiffener and so I had to cut up Zoe's cereal box. She won't mind. I hope.

The Wayne Memorial Letters

Wayne is the only man I will ever truly love. He was my first car, and he was beautiful.

It wasn’t just his three different paint colours and cow-spotted furry roof that made me fall head over heels for him. This was a car whose headlights would suddenly fail at midnight on the highway, whose passenger door would swing open unprompted when you turned a corner, whose handbrake would fail while parked in the driveway so that he rolled down into the street, whose bonnet would fly up while driving, completely obscuring your vision. This was a car who wanted to make your life interesting. Even people I’d never met knew his name. 

I was devastated when he finally went to the great car-yard in the sky, and at our old house I had a memorial wall in his honour: but here, the problem of the Blu-tac prohibition again reared its ugly head. Luckily, I had cardboard letters of his name in the boot of my car, where they’d been sitting soaking up petrol fumes for the past year and a half.

I decorated collage-style with different memories and souvenirs – it had to be messy and haphazard, or it wouldn’t be Wayne. (Really, leaving them to be crushed by oil containers in the boot wasn’t enough battering. I should have set them alight, put out the fire by soaking them in the bathtub then buried them in the backyard for six months.)

When Lyndon and I went to stay with a friend for the holidays, her son presented me with a card upon our arrival that contained his dire predictions regarding whether we were likely to ever make it home again.

His sister was equally cheerful. 

Dear Rach - I did not draw Wayne on the front of this card because I knew he would have spoilt it for you.

His predictions thankfully did not come to pass - this, however, did. 

The rest of the Y was also decorated with various recollections of mechanical failures and a photo of the corresponding part. (I could have decorated an entire alphabet with this.)

 Even the tops got some love. 

Others were taken from emails I'd sent years ago. 

Many of the memories are happy ones, but many of them also make me want to clutch my wallet to my chest protectively.

The now-teenage author of the Lyndon-pushing-Wayne card was recently talking to his mother about whether money could buy happiness, and pointed out that owning a Ferrari would make you fairly cheerful. “Do you think any car could make Rach happier than Wayne did?” she countered.

He was silent.