Recently I had a friend turn me on to this wonderful little item called 550 Paracord. What a brilliant little rope it is! As is stands 550 Paracord works wonderfully for holding stuff down when you need it or making a quick and dirty dog tie out when you forgot yours, but it also makes great crafting material.
I like to make stuff with my hands. There is a certain sense of satisfaction I get, you might call it a rush, when a project is completed and I can step back and look at my handy work. Now since I don’t have a massive garage or a butt load of amazing tools I am limited in the stuff I can make that serves to be useful. But with paracord you can have a bunch of fun little 20 minute projects that turn out well and are extremely useful given the right situation.
So far I have made two 10’ dog leashes w/S-biner clips (not pictured), two 3’ every day leashes with locking carabiners, and a couple survival bracelets. All of this could come in very handy when a bit of rope is needed and none is to be found because each and every one of these can be unwound to provide there original lengths. I found that the S-biners don’t work as well, my dogs can spin just the right way and the S-biner will pop off which is why I redesigned a shorter leash with a locking carabiner.
The dog leashes and locking carabiners provide a very strong leash that I don’t think would even stress under a 150lb Great Dane, though I don’t think your hands would be too comfortable (more on that later.) All in all I don’t think I spent more the $13 on each leash including the carabiners which are from a local outdoor store and are meant for climbing. Picking this set up in the store would run at least $35 so I am pretty happy.
You can see here I threaded the Paracord back into itself with some hemostats and melted the fraying ends. Braid it back in enough times and there will be no problems with strength because as the carabiner end pulls the braid gets tighter. I usually step on the carabiner end and pull it up as tight as I can when I am done to “set” the braid. One thing I am thinking about changing on my design here is adding some heat shrink around the braid just to make it look a bit more sleek. I wish I could find it in olive! Another change I would like to make is to add some kind of wider braid around the handle due to the fact that when new people show up my dogs like to pull, I mean they’re only Bostons but with enough pulling your hands begin to get tender. I will update later if I find a design that works well for the handle.
*survival bracelet, pretty simple and useful
So while it may not be the most manly crafting project it’s fun and they items look great. You can pick up Paracord on Amazon in a variety of colors to suit your needs for a little less then $1/10’. Buy some and make something!
