Weaved basket with a Lid

Hello everyone

I am back today with another project that I did for a client. I am blogging about this because its different from what I usually make...as in It has a lid on it and I usually make open baskets. Anyways its one of my favorites and so I am sharing this with you.

This basket is a weaving style basket and its weaved in the Mat style. I have used 13 newspaper tubes on the base for this basket. To make a sturdy basket. we need sturdy tubes...so I made some tightly wound tubes using the entire half of the newspaper sheet. So, I got uniformly sized tubes which were sturdy and I used a yarn weaving needle.....worked for me. And for the weaving part. I used normal newspaper tubes ( Divide your single side of paper in 3 parts lengthwise). For tutorial about how to weave the basket, visit my earlier post about newspaper weaving basket (Mat Style).

For the lid, I did something different. I coiled the newspaper tubes to 10" diameter as tightly as I could without applying any adhesive in between the coils. I only glued when I reached at the end of my coil. Then again the size of the coil depends on the diameter of your basket. Then what you do is slowly push the layers away. So you will get something like concave bowl. Please be gentle or it might just pop off and you can fix it back. You will have to recoil it. So go slow and as gentle as you can push the coils and shape it into a lid.

Once you are done with this. give it a nice coat of glue mixture (2 parts glue and 1 part water). Now, I have used 3 tubes of newspaper and made a plait out of it. I made 2 such plaits and I glued this plait to the edge of the lid as well as the opening of the basket. Glue it with strong white glue and once it dries, give the entire basket a good glue mixture wash.

 Once the basket dries for 6 hours, we can start painting it. I have used acrylic colors to paint it. Did parts of brows and parts of oranges. Let it dry for 1 hours and you can varnish your project. I have used Asian Paints Aquadur varnish. I did 2 coats in intervals of 2 hours. Let it dry for 1 whole day.

Last step is adding a notch to open the lid. I added a orange crochet flower on top and used a satin ribbon to hold a bead and pearl on top of the flower and knotted the ribbon on the inside.I had a tiny hole purposefully left for this when I was coiling the lid. The bead, pearls and the satin ribbon used are from Itsybitsy while the crochet flower is knitted by my mother-in-law....xoxo..

I hope you all liked my blog post and try to make a basket one for yourself. Its fun and very useful. Till next time...Keep crafting.