— Kelly Martinez
There should be an extra day of the week called sew day.
— Makerist
No matter how it looks from the outside, everything that is made by hand requires a lifetime of effort.
— Kit Dunsmore
From time to time my stitchery guild offers classes or seminars or whatever, and recently they offered a class in creating a woven fabric basket. Sounds like fun, right?
Well, I gotta tell you. I did not get off to a good start with this project. We were sent the instructions and I guess I didn’t read them correctly, because I kind of messed up, right off the mark.
To start with, we had to cut a number of fabric strips. I figured it would be easier to buy material than to dig through my fabric stash, so I took myself to Walmart and bought some fat quarters.
Unfortunately, a fat quarter was too short to use for my strips - my own fault, I hadn't really paid attention to what size the strips needed to be.
Then apparently I really didn’t read my instructions, because we were supposed to come to the first part of the class with our strips cut and ironed. Then we were going to spend the class inserting the batting in them and sewing them along the edges.
Well. After realizing the fat quarters weren’t going to work, I ended up having to go through my stash after all, and found some plain, pastel material as well as a print for contrast. So I brought it all with me . . . and spent the next two hours cutting and ironing (with lots of help).
The colour doesn’t show well in the picture, but when I was finished (at home) I had five long patterned strips, and fourteen solid coloured strips (seven pale pink, seven pale mauve).
But for the next class I was fully prepared. We were to have the bottom of our basket woven and sewn, ready to weave the horizontal strips in.
None of us had brought enough pins with us, and the clips really didn’t help as well as they should have, so those of us doing the project (not everyone was participating) spent a rather frustrating couple of hours weaving and re-weaving our baskets. In my case, I was moving my pins up as I wove, and ended up with a gap in the side where the ends of the horizonal strips were supposed to meet.
Back at home, where I had adequate pins, I did much better. However, I couldn’t help but notice that one of my horizontal strips was shorter than the others by about an inch, maybe a little more. So I decided to start with that one because I figured the bottom would be the narrowest.
Well, I was about a quarter of an inch short even meeting with the other end of the strip, let alone overlapping it like I was supposed to do. So I unpinned the whole thing, and then loosely sewed the two ends together making a loop. I found the middle opposite where I joined it, and pinned it in place on one side of the basket, pinning the part I’d joined on the other.
It was a bit of a tight squeeze, but I finally got that first row pinned in place. After that it went fairly easily. With three rows done, you can see the basket shape starting to take place.
And here’s the finished basket, all that’s left is to do some top stitching (by hand) around the top to tack the strips in place.
And after all that work, I think I’ll go get one of those glass domes to put it under, to preserve it for all time.
No comments:
Post a Comment