How to Make an Adjustable Quilted Camera Strap with Pocket

I knew I needed to make a quilted camera strap as soon as I bought a new camera.  In fact, to make it with everything option I wanted, I needed to make an adjustable quilted camera strap with a pocket.

Fancy New Camera

If you’ve been following along on this blog for any length of time, you know that I’ve had all sorts of camera problems this spring.  It gave me a good opportunity to just sew for fun, but in order to continue this blog, I needed to have the ability to take step by step photographs for tutorials.

So, I dove headfirst into camera research and scored a great deal on a new mirrorless camera.  I don’t really even know what mirrorless means, but apparently it’s where camera technology is headed.  Now is the time when that goal to take a photography class would really come in handy!

Once I got home with my new treasure, I started playing with it right away.  Since it was a rainy day, I had to find something inside to photograph, and unfortunately for Scout, she wasn’t asleep under the bed and had to be my subject.  She was not amused, but tolerated me getting in her face for about 10 seconds.

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She’s awfully pretty, isn’t she? Still, I’m looking forward to summer finally starting so that I can get out hiking and try out my new camera outside.

My awesome new camera came with a lousy, thin, scratchy, not well-secured strap so I knew right away I wanted to make a new one.  And I’m Darcy Quilts, not Darcy-uses-a-single-piece-of-fabric, so of course I made a quilted camera strap.  Scratch that.  I made an adjustable quilted camera strap with a pocket!

Now, you can absolutely follow my directions to make a padded camera strap with one piece of fabric without all of the piecing and quilting, just skip past the triangle directions and go straight to putting it all together.

Adjustable Quilted Camera Strap Tutorial

Supplies Needed:  Fabric, a buckle, D-rings and clasps.  Also shown: the original crappy strap and the lens cap that I wanted to make a pocket for.  Side note, why doesn’t the lens cap come with a place to attach a string to the camera body?  Why?!?!?

The camera strap needs to be 40-50 inches long, depending on your height and how you want it to fit.  You can use two solid pieces of fabric.  Or two strips made from smaller pieces.  Or one of each.  You do you.

The width of your strip needs to be the width of your buckle and D-rings plus ½” for seam allowance.

My hardware is 1½”.  I was hoping for 2”, but the store didn’t have it.  Who knows if that even exists.  So I started with 2” strips of fabric, and cut lots of equilateral triangles.

I even fussy cut some hummingbirds and butterflies.

Sew the triangles into pairs.  Check out this Tips for Triangles tutorial for more advice on working with equilateral triangles.

Sew the pairs into fours, and the fours into eights, and so on until you’ve reached your desired length.

Putting It All Together

This is where to jump back into the tutorial if you skipped the piecing your fabric into a long strip step and went straight two solid pieces of fabric.

Now you’ve got a long strip for a camera strap, an equally long strip (just one fabric for me this time) for the backing of the camera strap and a fussy cut hummingbird to make a pouch for the camera lens cover.  You should also have a piece of batting that is a little bit wider than your fabric strips, but I forgot to include that in this picture.

Quilt the front (outside) of your camera strap to your batting.  I quilted every single seam of the triangles, which may have been overkill, but I wanted to make sure it wouldn’t come apart.  Quilt as much or as little as you like for this step, just make sure it’s tacked down in a few places.  Trim the edges to be the same width as the camera strap top.

A Pouch for the Lens Cover

I know (KNOW!!) I’ll misplace my lens cover.  I’ve already forgot to put it back on between uses, even though the camera hasn’t left my house yet.  So I wanted a little pouch or pocket to store it in.

The size you make your pouch will vary based on the size of your lens cover.  Mine was a little more than 2” in diameter, so I cut the fabric for my pouch at three inches.

Fold over the top ¼”, then fold it over a second time, and top stitch it into place.

Iron a small pleat into your pocket, so that it will be the same width as your camera strap.  Remember, my camera strap will only be 1½” wide, but my lens cap is 2”.  This way the bottom and sides will get sewn into the strap and be the right width, while the pouch will still be wide enough to hold the cap.

Pin the pouch fabric, right sides together, to the strip that will be your backing or inside of your camera strap.  Pin near one edge, although not right at the edge, and most importantly, pin it upside down so that the top edge of the pouch is closest to the end of the strip.

Stitch straight across the unfinished edge of the pouch, using a ¼” seam.  Unpin, flip the pouch fabric up, and iron that bottom seam.

You now have a camera strap top quilted to the batting and a camera strap back with the beginnings of a pouch.

With right sides together, pin the top to the back.  Please ignore all my messy loose threads, I got a little lazy on the cleaning up step.

I made my backing a little larger than my camera strap, just to make sure it all quilted together nicely.

Using a ¼” seam, sew along both edges of camera strap.  I put a pin in place to keep the pouch steady.  This is the step that is going to give your pouch it’s side seams by sewing them right into the seams of the camera strap.

Trim excess batting, if any.

It’s time to turn your camera strap right side out!  Use whatever method works best for you to turn this long, skinny tube right side out.  I used a safety pin on one end and pushed it thorough the tube.

Press the whole camera strap flat.  If you are not using a lens cap pouch, you can top stitch along the length of your camera strap on both sides.  I didn’t want to do that, because it would have made my pouch too small, but I do recommend it for other camera straps as it will help the whole strap to lay flat.

Adding the Hardware

Attach the swivel hooks to the D-rings.  Maybe you were luckier than me and able to find these as one unit.  If you have to put them together like I did, you are probably going to want a pair of pliers.

To put the camera strap all together, start with the buckle, and the end that DOES NOT have the pouch/pocket.

Thread the camera strap through the buckle.

Loop the fabric strap around the center bar of the buckle, and stitch into place.

Thread a D-ring onto the fabric strap, and leave it several inches away from the buckle.  Remember, this camera strap will be adjustable, so at this point it doesn’t really matter if it’s 1” or 10” away from the buckle.

Fold the fabric strap over the D-ring and thread through the buckle.  The outer rim of the buckle will be visible, but the center bar will not be.

At the other end of the fabric strap, thread the strap through the remaining D-ring, fold over and stitch in place.

And voila!  A quilted adjustable camera strap with pocket made from fun fabrics!

I don’t step out from behind the camera all that often, but I wanted to show off my new camera strap at work.  Guys, it’s hard!  Hold the new camera, hold the phone camera, look at the phone without squinting in the sun, fail at finding shade, forget to check that the camera strap hasn’t twisted so that the pocket is showing rather than the triangles, etc.  Hard!

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I’m going to stick to making quilts and not taking selfies.  Although now that I’ve got a fancy camera, maybe I should be learning to take selfies- messy hair, freckles, sun damaged skin and all!