Tag Archives: basket

A Quick Storage Basket

A new year always seems to make people want to tidy up, and once I’d taken my Christmas tree down I realised that the table it had been on, could do with a little sorting out. The worst culprits for making it look a total mess, were the bundle of charger leads draped over a letter rack. The chargers get used too frequently to justify them being tucked away in a cupboard, so I felt the next best thing would be to make a little fabric basket to keep them tidy while still being accessible.

The pattern actually makes three baskets, but I only wanted to make one in this particular size (and wanted an excuse to use up some of my larger fabric scraps). I did make it slightly shorter than the pattern, simply because the fabric I was going to use for the cuff wasn’t quite long enough otherwise!

The fabric was actually part of a duvet cover I’d used as a ‘wearable muslin’ for a dress pattern previously – the main pattern was one side, and the cuff was the reverse design.

To quilt the basket, I simply stitched down some of the edges of the boxes. I don’t (yet) have a darning foot for my machine, so I decided that free-motion quilting was going to be a bit beyond my skills at the moment!

As you can see, two chargers fit perfectly into the basket, and if I make a couple more baskets for my relatives’ phone chargers too, there should be a lot less chance of getting in a muddle with which charger is for which device!

Fabric Basket

Ever since I was given a Lush bubble bar for my birthday a year ago,  I’ve developed a bit of an obsession with things from Lush. My main trouble though, has been where to put everything; there’s a limit to how well you can stack bath bombs, pots of hand cream and shampoo bars, especially when the Lush packaging is mainly paper bags – that isn’t ideal for a damp shampoo bar!

My room’s colour scheme is purple and silver, so I didn’t really want to buy a basket to put them in, as it’d be guaranteed there wouldn’t be one that was quite the right size or colour. I did however find some really nice purple cotton fabric in the sale, and with the tutorial from Delia Creates, I was able to make a basket that not only fits the products, but also looks much better than a pile of bags and pots on the surface!

I found a few plastic containers in Poundland (these easily house a shampoo bar) and which work perfectly for storing my shampoo bars, conditioner bar and also pieces of soap. This basket is the perfect size for those, a few pots of hand cream, and also a bath bomb!

basket-a2

To stop the purple looking a bit too heavy, I did the top stitching in white to lift it a little. Silver might have looked better still, but I didn’t have any suitable thread. I decided that the handles weren’t really needed, so I left those out. The basket is washable and also fully reversible – if any of the Mask of Magnaminty ends up on it, it’s not the end of the world!