I tried my hand at making a basket out of paper. I use pages from the phone book and a contact lens solution box.
I made dozens of paper sticks by rolling paper around a barbeque skewer. It's easy, but so tedious that you will get bored making them.
The base was kind of difficult to keep the odd number of paper sticks spaced evenly apart. In the tutorial I saw, the girl used 9 sticks, but I wanted to try a tighter weave, so I did 11. My mistake was I used too much glue that it became too wet to dry fast that I had to blow dry it. Plus, the wetness made the paper rip apart from the cardboard circle. Lesson learned.
Do not use too much glue and try to glue each stick down with enough glue.
You just weave a paper stick along the "branches" of the circle using the kindergarten method of "over-under" until you reach the end. I inserted another paper stick onto the previous one to keep the stick longer until I reached the desired height of my basket.
Be careful, though. You don't want this mistake of skipping a branch, in my case, two. Good thing I noticed it before I've gone farther up. That would be annoying having to unravel the weave to fix it.
most likely than not, your basket with be crooked and will lean to one size, especially if your base branches aren't evenly spaced apart. You can always adjust the paper and try to lean it back to make it even. You can somewhat fix it in the end when you glue top end of your basket.
Once I've reached the desired height, I clipped the excess off, keeping about an inch to glue down, I used clips to keep the glue ends secure. I pulled the branches to tighten my weave, and it somewhat straightened out the basket. Since my base wasn't evenly spaced, it still looks crooked. Oh, well.
When the ends are all dry, I coated the whole basket-inside and out- with white glue using a paint brush. It stiffens the paper so it won't crush so easily. It looks pretty cool just like that, plus I painted on clear acrylic to make it shiny.
I decided to paint it lavender on the outside and kept the paper look inside. I painted the cardboard circle inside, though, because it looked ghetto. lol. The paint I used was a matte acrylic, so I painted Mod Podge with gloss to make it shiny again.
Not bad with my first paper weaving project. It's big enough for pens and pencils, but too small for scissors and paint brushes. If I want a bigger size basket, I have to make a bigger circle for my base.
What do you think? It is really easy, though I didn't explain it so well. If you want to try, let me know and I'll find that YT tutorial for you to follow.
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