Handmade rope and fabric baskets are among the oldest techniques of basket weaving with recycled fabric, but today the work is easier because we have large rolls of fabric strips. These handmade baskets are very beautiful and rustic, a perfect choice to use at home as a decorative utility. With this technique, as you can see, you can make bags, mats and other accessories.

Fabric and rope baskets

Recently we shared a tutorial on our blog to make fabric baskets using a sewing machine. If you want to check the procedure see: How to make baskets using a sewing machine.

After we shared this article on our blog, a dear reader asked us if these baskets can be also hand sew, and the answer is: yes. The process will be slow and complicated, but the result will be the same as if you use a sewing machine to make the basket.

The zig zag stitching is an excellent choice to give a good finish to the rope basket. And it will be much prettier if you use fabrics with a pattern, gradient color or multi-colored.

You wrap the rope and start sewing. To do this, look at the diagram below.

In this case a 4 millimeters rope was used to make these baskets. With this measure, to make a full basket you will need about 98 feet of rope.

Once completed, you can decorate with fabric flowers, buttons, ribbons , or whatever you like.

With this technique you also can make other creations as rugs or bags, but we are going to share them in another post.

This technique allows many variations, one of them is to wrap the rope differently, for example you can wrap the fabric vertically.

And with the same technique you can make other utilities, such as mats and placemats.

As you can see, with creativity you can vary the basic technique to create your own models of rope baskets. I hope you like this idea and make a lot of rope baskets for your home.

Images: babairisha, Helen Deighan’s baskets, Junko Suzuki’s baskets.