Braided Fabric Bowl

While I've worked up a fair bit of hand stitching stamina this past year, my desire to get back to working with machines has been very slow coming.  This has happened before and I've learnt that a helpful way to get me started again is to create a small 'play' project.  

With a long standing passion for machine stitching bowls, I decided to try out machine stitching a new version of a braided bowl - with the added advantage of using up brown 'dinosaur' fabric that was unlikely to otherwise see the light of day any time soon!  This did the trick nicely and resulted in a few very enjoyable hours at my rather neglected sewing machine.

Interestingly, it was an old gadget that I bought from an antique stand at my first visit to Wonderwool in Wales this year that kind of nailed my new approach.  This nifty trio of metal 'folders' for fabric lengths for rug making must be at least 100 years old.  

The kit was in surprisingly good condition and with excellent instructions for folding and plaitng fabric, I immediately thought of a 21st century alternative - those metal folders look very much like modern binding tools!

What I particularly liked about my new braiding approach was no frayed edges!  While do like a bit of tasteful fraying, my past experiments with braiding frayed cotton fabric strips has often been disappointing.  Modern cottons tend to have lots of white in the fray and with a lesser thread count than times past, they can fray to excess.  

Folding in edges using a binding tool was surprisingly speedy and after a bit of trialling fabric widths, a very neat fabric plait was ready read to machine stitch,

Having secured one end tightly, I started to make a coil and set a wide zigzag to stitch together.  It was a bit fiddly machine stitching the start of a coil and I just got in lots of stitches in no particular order to hold the centre of the coil together.  

Once I had a bit of coil to hold on to, machining the rounds together got very much easier.  For anyone doing this for the first time, I recommend a toning thread colour that blends into the fabric colours.

I found it best to keep the 3 fabric strips for the plait at variable lengths to avoid creating a bulk of joins.  When I needed to add to a length, a dab of fabric glue was all that was needed to join in the next length.  

When the coil had become the desired size of the bowl base, I started to make the sides are by lifting the coil on the left side while I continued machine stitching - I knew from lots of past bowl stitching that the greater the lift the steeper the sides of the bowl would be.  

To make a neat join at the top of the bowl, I tapered each of the fabric strip ends into the plait on the previous round and I added a bit of glue and a few hand stitches to secure. 

There are numerous possibilties for shaping the bowl from the beginning to make ovals and oblongs and making the shape taper out or in.  Alternatively the creation can be kept flat for a mat or rug - a serious supply of excess fabric will be required for the latter!  Here are a few of my students creations this summer - everyone really enjoyed creating and all are now looking at their undesirable cotton fabrics in a whole new light :)