A Braided Fabric Bowl from Vintage Scraps

One of my daughters 4-H projects was going to be a fabric bowl.  Well, I ended up making one along side of her. 

The first step is to choose your fabrics.  Keep in mind that color matters more than the pattern.

After you choose your fabrics, tear them into about 1" strips.  

The length doesn't really matter.

I was playing in my scraps while my daughter started working on her braid.  She said I should just make a bowl too.  I welcomed the idea!

Choose three strips and pin them together.

Begin braiding.  The way we did this made it easy to move the chairs as the braid grew.  Plus the chair was heavy enough to pull on while braiding without tipping over.

Her braid stretched out.  We made about 6 feet of braid or so for a small bowl.  

This goes pretty quickly.

When a strip runs out, connect another and continue on.

Line up the two slits you cut in both pieces.

This is definitely a scrappy project!

Braid on.

I began coiling my braid and hand stitched it together.

As I went along and the bowl grew, I tried to shape it and stitch it into a bowl. 

That worked to a degree.  But, it was still a bit flat.  Quite a bit. So I soaked the whole thing in water.

And shaped it over a custard cup and let it air dry.  This took a couple of days to dry completely. I think you could speed it along in the oven if you wished.  It worked and the bowl form held. 

It's perfect to hold small treasures!!

My daughter's bowl ended up a little wonky and she didn't want to take it to the fair.   That's fine, it's all a learning process.

And that learning process will include trying to perfect the shaping and stitching so it doesn't need to be soaked, shaped, and dried.  Any thoughts on this from anyone?

I looked at quite a few links and projects over the web trying to find how to do this, but none just stood out as a "go to" site to make your own fabric bowl so I"m not referencing them here. 

This is really a fun project, especially to use up scraps!