Team: Ward, Fanisi and Roba
The coin purse activity was a lesson on how to improvise and make the most of al the available plastic lab resources. It turned out to be a lot easier than anticipated because of the simple instructions and availability of all the lab tools. Evidently, it was nice to realise that plastic craft-making is an activity that is accessible to everyone (not just manufacturers) – in part thanks to knowledge sharing by people like professor Godoy. Working together with other students also made this a quick activity because we were able to split tasks in terms of cutting, ironing and folding the plastic. Below is an overview of what the process looked like:
The Process in Pictures:
Step 1: We started off by cutting up the plastic bags. This was a simple but important step because there was a limited number of plastic bags in the lab. To overcome this we cut our plastic bags in a way that would allow us to fold one single bag very many times so that it we can get the thick material required for the coin purse. After this we ironed the folded plastic and periodically checked how well fused the plastic layers were:
The final output of the process is seen in the below picture. As you can seem the plastic is not very smooth but perhaps this is because we were ironing on a rough wooden surface outside of the plastic lab. As observed by another team, it may also be due to the quality of the paper that we used. 
Step 2: We used the cutting stencils provided by the handout to draw and cut out the required shape, as well as adding the necessary holes for where the buttons would go. It was a good thing that only whiteboard markers were available because there were a number of sketching mistakes that occured when trying to create the holes for the buttons 🙂
Step 3: Below are our photo’s capturing the folding process. This step was easy for our group because we came during the second lab session and we were able to ask the students in the first session for some directions and guidance on how to apply the buttons using the snap pliers.
The layout of the final product!
We made a third coin purse also, except this time using only one colour for the button: red. The bright red against the white plastic bag material gave the purse a really bold aesthetic:
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