woven felt flower girl basket

i'm off to seattle for a wedding, and here is the flower girl basket i made for it!

this is the same design as the felt basket that i made for the felt vegetables in a previous post. here's how to make one of your own.

cut 9 strips of felt, 50cm long, and 4cm wide. of course you can alter these dimensions, these are just the ones i used, which work well for a square basket 3 strips wide in each directions. 6 strips make the bottom of the basket, and become the sides. 3 more strips are woven around the sides. you'll need another 50cm by 12cm strip for the handle.

lay out 3 vertical strips, and weave 3 horizontal strips. here's the 1st one.

the 2nd one

all 3.
baste around the edges, after pulling the strips tightly together. this is just to hold them together as you move on to the next part.

take a new strip and start weaving around the side.

when it goes all the way around, overlap the ends, pull them snug, and baste them together.

repeat with a 2nd strip woven around the sides.

for the 3rd strip, cut it in half lengthwise. this actually means you have 4 strips total, 2 wide ones and 2 narrow ones. weave the narrow ones around the side of the basket, and baste the ends as before.
fold each verticle strip coming up the side of the basket (these are the same strips that started out as the bottom of the basket) over the edge. fold it over TWO of the horizontal strips (i.e. fold it over BOTH the narrow strips, and then tuck in the end under the wide horizonal strip. that means that half of you side strips will be folded inside the basket, and half outside the basket. they will stick out the other side of the wide strip after you tuck them through it, this is fine, we will trim them later.

this is the basket with all the side strips foldeded over the edge and tucked in.

next we make the handle. i used a 50cm by 12 sm wide strip, which i folded over itself in 3rds and sewed together (to make a handle that has 3 layers). this was pretty sturdy even with the felt i was using, which was quite thin. for the felt veggie basket from the previous post, i used 2 layers sewn together, which worked fine, but since this basket is actually going to be carried by a little girl in a ceremony, i wanted the handle to be pretty sturdy and hold it's shape.

i wove the handle into the basket, doubling it up with the middle side strips. i chose to put the handles on the two sides where the handle is OUTSIDE the basket at the top row. is this picture, the handle is sticking out a little at the bottom of the basket, this is just to show you that you insert the handle piece all the way down the side. then pull it even so that the end of the handle lines up with the edge of the side/bottom of the basket. and baste this end.

the handle inserted on both sides.

next, sew the edges of the felt together, while making any adjustments to make the basket more even or the woven strips more tight an consistent. remove the basting stitches.

for this basket, i sewed around all the edges on the outside of the basket only. the order that worked best for me was: sew the 4 corners of the basket, in the vertical direction. then sew the other verticle edges (2 on each side). then trim off the ends that we wove in earlier. then sew the 2 horizonal edges all the way around the basket.

ta-da!