Recycled Rubber

It’s more fun to make a laptop bag from an old wetsuit than it is to buy a new one…

I’ve seen a few round-up style lists of “best laptop bags” but most of them seem pretty pricey and not really that interesting — there is so much “waste” material out there you could easily make a laptop bag for each day of the week, so here’s one of my favorite projects from MAKE magazine (where I work)… a DIY laptop bag made from an old wetsuit by Saul Griffith. I’ve also included a round up of some other of my favorite DIY and remade laptop bags.

How to make a wetsuit laptop bag…

This bag gets noticed (by hipsters not thieves), and makes me feel like I foiled the landfill again. All that, and it does the trick nicely. Only took about four hours to make. To start, wash and deodorize the wetsuit. Use gentle detergents and a dash of vinegar, and warm-water hand agitation.

Wetsuits don’t have a lot of flat straight pieces, you’ll see mine is made from strips cut from the worn pieces of the old suit. I just eyeballed and oversized the panels a little to allow for the seams and ended up with a stretchy case, like sexy spandex for your computer.

Neoprene can be hand-stitched, which gives a wonderful Frankenstein aesthetic, but it’s a lot faster to use a sewing machine, and you’ll be able to make more mistakes without feeling guilty about starting over. Most strong home sewing machines will do the trick; just make sure you use a large denim needle and thick polyester thread. I have sailmaker’s Dacron thread, which is perfect.

If your machine is weak, you may need to manually help the poor little motor by winding with the machine on the down-stroke and letting it find it’s own way home coming back up. This is slow, but better than hand stitching. If the neoprene is really thick, you’ll get better results by lifting the sewing machine’s foot completely to accommodate your wad of material.

Scoring Used Neoprene - If you don’t surf or dive, ask a buddy who does. He or she should be able to set you up with a thrashed suit. You can recycle some of the 5 billion dot.com mousepads that still plague us — they’re made of neoprene, too.

On eBay, you’ll find plenty of wetsuits being sold by people who liked the idea of surfing after watching Endless Summer and gave up after swallowing a pint of ocean the first time they got in the water.

You can also buy new 51″x83″ sheets of neoprene from places like foamorder.com, but that sort of defeats the purpose.