The Electric Eel 6.0 spinning wheels from last year’s Kickstarter campaign are on a boat in Savannah as I write, heading to Boston. I’ll have mine by the end of next month, I hope. It’s time to make a case to carry it in. The open tote I use for the Nano won’t work for the 6.0, and I want a more robust case, anyway.
I found a wheeled suitcase at a thrift shop in Woodbridge, VA, when I was up north doing a week of Dad care. Six dollars, ugly, and boring, but the right size, with lots of pockets and zippers and a good strap. (People have been talking about Zuca bags, but that’s a bit out of my price range.) Six dollars was not. (I turned away from a Victorinox bag because it was $30.)
The first idea was to cut up my collection of Laurel Burch bags and applique them onto my own carrier. However, none of the sections of the Laurel Burch bags were great matches for the spaces on this tote, so I decided to save them for something else. I would paint the bag. I didn’t take a picture before I started masking off the black straps and trip.
The first base coat was yellow because I had a can of paint in the house. It didn’t work–something about the paint and the suitcase fabric made it so that as the paint dried, it soaked into the fabric and left an ugly grey-yellow color. I let that dry for a week and then used a can of flat pink left over from repainting our plastic yard flamingos. That gave a better result.
The next step is to set up somewhere I can play with acrylics and take this further.
Update: I bought a new-to-me tote bag from the thrift shop for my Nano. I spent 15 minutes this morning moving all my tools into the bag only to discover it’s too small to hold everything I want to carry. That’s OK; the bag was $4.00. However, it made me think that it would be a good idea to wait until the 6.0 arrives to see how it fits in the bag in these pictures before I invent a lot of time in painting this suitcase.
