I scored these great little binoculars at the thrift store for a buck fifty. They work great and have a nice weight to them, but the strap was boring and broken.

I drew some inspiration from an earlier upgrade I made using a belt. We have what I think of fondly as the “parent camera.” It is the Canon ESO Rebel T1i. Look around the next time you are at a zoo or museum. If a parent isn’t using a smartphone to take pics, they are almost guaranteed to be using this camera.

It is a great camera. It has taken 5 years worth of great memories for us, but I never loved the strap and I also feared we would get ours mixed up in the sea of matching cameras. I briefly looked into buying a nicer strap before I remember that I know how to make things.

I decided to add a belt to the strap and low and behold I had one that was just the right width. All I had to do was stitch it on and you can’t even tell.

So back to the binoculars. They are smaller and lighter, so I decided to replace the strap altogether (rather than adding on to the existing strap as I had done with the camera).

This was a very straight-forward sewing project, but it is amazing how a little refresh can make something old feel new again. I just took a belt and machine-stitched it to the D rings that came with the binoculars. I folded the belt in half for a skinny strap and I think it came out great.

Ellis approves!