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No-Sew Summer Basket Tutorial

by | DIY, Home, Mixed Media, Summer

Did I mention work is coming to a head?  Yeah, and J is headed straight to terrible toddler-hood.  And I still have to write up the awesomeness that is the gift exchange that I participated in, both of them.  And then there’s the crafts for SYTYC – one a week, that’s a serious schedule!  And I’m transitioning to a new laptop, which means I’ve got photos sitting on both, waiting to be edited and uploaded.  Oh, peace and quiet, we’ll have to have a lunch date soon.

Here’s the tutorial for a no-sew basket that I made for SYTYC – did you vote for it?

Like the Scrap Wood Lantern, the brainstorming process for this project took quite a circuitous route.  I was originally thinking about some summer placemats, but after Drew gave me a big THUMBS DOWN, I asked him for ideas, if he was so clever indeed.  We also had to take into account that we were going to be on vacation that week, so I wouldn’t have access to my usual assortment of sewing and crafting and woodworking supplies.  My MIL gave us a spark of inspiration when she talked about handmade baskets in Williamsburg, and then Drew suggested that his dad cut me super thin slices of wood with which to weave a basket.  Are you kidding me?!  But then, I remembered the hot Pinterest pin of making baskets out of paper, and figured I can probably do it with fabric, so we went looking for the nearest Joann’s store!

One Dog Woof: Fabric Woven Summer Basket

Supplies

2 yds of 60″ wide heavy duck canvas.  I used 1 yd of each color.
2 rolls of 3/4″ hem tape.
iron.
scissors + t-square (or rotary cutter/mat/straight edge)
hot glue
Beware, there’s some math involved.

I was lucky that my brother-in-law had a 4 foot dry wall T-square sitting around in his basement, so I used that to mark off my strips of fabric, the long way.  So, for a yard of duck canvas (36″), I got 7 strips that were 5″ wide and 60″ long.

Fold each strip in half lengthwise, and fold in the rough edges lengthwise by 1/2″.

Iron your creases.

Follow the instructions for the hem tape to join the 2 hemmed edges together.

That whole spiel was to create 2″ hemmed strips of fabric.  You could easily just sew it with a 1/2″ seam allowance and turn the whole thing inside out.  Either way, you are creating 2″ strips out of your 5″ piece.

Lather, rinse, repeat for all your strips except one of each color.

(I have no pictures of the above because I was in the basement, ironing by the light of 1 light bulb, without realizing there were about 4 other fluorescent lights I could have turned on.)

One Dog Woof: Canvas strips to make woven basket

Now you have a lot of long strips of fabric.  Decide which color you want to be the base of your basket.  Take 6 (out of 7) of those strips and cut in half to create 12 strips, now 2″ by 30″ long instead of the original 60″ long.  Leave the others as is.

One Dog Woof: Weave canvas strips together to make a basket

Weave those shortened strips into a 6×4 pattern, which gives you a basket base of 12″ by 10″.  Since your strips are 30″ long, you should have (30 – 12)/2 or 9″ leftover on each short side of the basket and (30 – 10)/2 or 10″ leftover on the long side of the basket.  These leftovers will become the part of the walls of the basket.  Glue the pieces in place to prevent movement.

One Dog Woof: Woven Basket using Canvas strips

Now grab a strip of the other color, hot glue the end to one of the blue upright pieces, and start weaving your walls around the base, gluing as you go.  It sounds complicated, but it’s just weaving.  And since you’re using fabric, you can manipulate is any way you need to in order to glue the pieces together.  An extra hand may help.

One Dog Woof: hot glue canvas strips together

(I ended up hanging the basket over the corner of the table in order to have a good gluing surface.)

One Dog Woof: Weave a summer basket using canvas strips

You should be able to fit 4 full strips (8″) of your coordinating color to the basket and then have about an inch or 1 1/2″ leftover sticking out the top.  Fold those rough edges down and glue them in place.

One Dog Woof

Then take one of your uncut, un-hemmed strips of fabric in the color of your choice and use that as the binding on the top of the basket.  Glue glue glue.

One Dog Woof

To finish, grab some scraps of strips to make the handles.  Try to tuck in the rough edges into the basket weave, and glue in place.  Then you’ll want to just go back around and add some dots of hot glue here and there to clean up any rough edges or seams.

One Dog Woof: Use canvas strips to weave a summer basket. Full tutorial.

Since I made this basket way out in Indianapolis, it did not come home with me.  It is now decorating the room of my cutie patootie nephew, housing all of his plush friends in canvas comfort!

17 Comments

  1. The Bean Sprout Notes

    Crafting on vacation – super impressive! What a creative design to solve the no-sewing-machine-while-traveling issue.

  2. Chelsea @ two twenty one

    So cute! I’m still sad we didn’t get a chance to meet up while you were here!

  3. Lisa

    Ummm, I love this. Pinning!

  4. Ruth @ atnumber29

    Awesome! Pinning this now and thinking of all the materials I could waeve a basket from…

  5. April @ illistyle

    I love this! So creative to use hem tape! Genius. Found you through 52 Mantels. Thanks for sharing! xoxo

  6. BEARKIS

    Good creation,I love it!Happy weekend!:)

  7. Sparkling

    This is interesting. How well would you say it stands up when it’s filled with stuff? Does it flop over or does it stay pretty tall and sturdy? Found you at iheartnaptime.

  8. Amy

    Love this, ChiWei! Great job! I bet your nephew is thrilled with it; I know LC would love to get his hands on it to put his stuffed buddies in, but mama would like it too!

  9. Emily Morgenstern

    Wow! What a neat idea and I love the blue and yellow together. I’ll go check out SYTYC!

  10. Ginger

    I’ll be featuring YOU this afternoon over on my blog. Thank you so much for linking up with {wow me} wednesday.

    Ginger @ gingersnapcrafts.com

  11. Linda L.

    The pattern says to do a 6 x 4 strip weave with the first colour but the picture is 6 x 5 and you say the bottom will be 12″ x 10″. Should it be 4 or 5 strips?
    Is there a way to print the pattern out from your site?

  12. ChiWei

    It may be a typo, so apologies! I no longer have the basket on hand so I can’t check to be sure, but having 5 strips sounds right. You can print from the browser, but I do not have this tutorial in a PDF form. Thanks!

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