Winter Wonderland with Batiks

The theme for this month with the Island Batik ambassadors is “winter Wonderland”

I looked in my box and being inspired by another ambassador, I decided to use these left over winter strips too. Then I got the idea for coiled baskets using cotton cording.

I started cutting the strips in half (It looked like they were the middle part of a bolt after cutting fat quarters out of it and since Island Batik is usually wider than 40”, it’s more like 42” then there’s 2” left over and I didn’t measure the strip length but 18” is a good guess

So working with 1” x 18” strips I wrapped one around the end of the cording and then coil wrapped the cord down and started with my walking foot and blue thread and a zig zag stitch, I zig zagged around and coiled the cording in a circular fashion, the beginning is the hardest, then after that it’s easy!!

at some point I started tilting up the coiling so create the lip/edge of the basket and kept it tilted until the end.

here’s the finished basket

I decided to end with the dark blue almost solid batik and stop when it just met again around the circle.

here’s the bottom

Anja- the fashionista had to try it as a hat

Once you make one of these baskets, like chips, one is never enough, I had to make another one!!

Here I decided to alternate light and dark strips and see what happened and I used a light thread too.

It’s funny how at some point it was half the side of the bowl was dark and the other half was light.

At the end I finished with dark all the way around.

Here’s two of them together

But then a 3rd one just had to be made too! and this time I didn’t do a circle, I did an oval bottom instead at the beginning

And gradually it went from light to medium blue

Here’s the 3 bowls together!

I still had strips left over and then I got another idea.

a quilted ornament!! (I’ve done these before in batiks)

I got my supplies ready

and VOILA! in about an hour I finished this blue ornament

I kind of did it by memory, well I checked how many fabric pieces I needed, but that’s it. I do need to find another way to be better at marking the perfect opposite sides to start with, but it’s still cute

here’s the collection I have so far, only one is not in batiks

looks pretty good in the large coiled basket!

I showed these here

If you want to get the pattern, go here