forest I--basket waving meets automobile

check out this amazing woven car. via poppy talk. It's actually salvaged bark woven on top of the car, by basket weaver annie ross.

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!

weaving in nishijin, kyoto part 2

earlier this month, i visited the nishijin textile center in kyoto. the nishijin weaving style originated about 500 years ago, when a group of weavers were introduced to silk weaving techniques from china, and lived in the western camp (nishijin) of a general at the time.the textile center is a large and has comprehensive displays, including looms.
spinning
mini dioramas of (i guess) traditional silk stores?in the end though, the nishijin textile center is a big souvenir emporium...it has a variety of mini cultural courses. i haven't tried any of their classes, but for anyone seriously interested in crafts, i recommend orinasu (from the previous post) instead just because the textile center is so cheesy.

weaving in nishijin, kyoto textile district-part 1

last month i did a weaving workshop in kyoto with my mom and my crafty friend rebecca. the nishijin area of kyoto is the textile district, and also the name of a traditional weaving style.
our teacher. the workshop was at orinasu-kan, which is housed in a traditional japanese shop house. they have a textile display section, a workshop space, and next door is a working textile factory. unfortunately, you can't take pictures in the factory section, but it was very cool to see how they are using the traditional looms, but updated with electrical and computer technology. (although they showed us a 3.5 floppy disk during the explanation about technology, so i'm not sure how cutting edge it is;-)
a traditional spinning wheel on display in the museum.
we starting by picking colors of silk to use as our weft.
the looms were already warped, so we tried to match the colors.
weaving...weaving...woven.
our finished work. it took 2 hours, and i think we all felt like we had just gotten the hang of tossing the shuttle with the right motion/speed when our time was up.
aerial view of our placemats with a baby for scale.
and this one's just for cuteness.

i would highly recommend this workshop for people who want an intro to weaving. of the three of us, i was the total beginner, so it was a fine level for me. i think for someone like my mom who has done a lot of weaving, it was a fun experience, but didn't get into any advanced information. the instruction was all in japanese. if you don't speak japanese, i think you would have no problem going and weaving a placemat, but obviously you wouldn't be able to understand a lot of information. they are listed in lonely planet too, by the way.