DIY fabric-covered basket tutorial

Hi there, I'm Ricki, and this is my first blog post :) It's a tutorial! Woo hoo!

 I gave a bunch of these fabric-covered baskets for Christmas. I thought they looked pretty cute, and they were cheap for me to make! My cost of materials:

• Basket from Dollarama: $2
• nameplate label holder things from Walmart: $1 apiece (came in packs of 4)
• Ribbon from Michaels: about $0.50 per basket
• Spray adhesive: about $0.50 per basket
• Spray varnish, Aleene's glue, dropcloth fabric, stamps, ink, old dictionary: on hand

All in all, about $4 total cost to me per basket, and 2 hours each to make.

Using your box as a guide, cut your fabric out, then iron it. It's a lot like wrapping a present, so if you're good at that, this is easy. Double-check to make sure it will fit correctly.

Now on a WELL-COVERED surface or within a large cardboard box you don't care about, flip the box over and spray its bottom and sides with a good coating of spray adhesive. (No matter how much newspaper I put down, somehow I always get spray glue on the floor, which is gross. Learn from my mistakes!!) Now set the box on the center of the fabric, like so. In the rest of the photos, keep in mind that the outer side of the box is very sticky with spray adhesive.

Flip the box and fabric over, and on the bottom of the box, press the fabric very snugly into the adhesive. Then flip again to be right-side up.

Cut pieces from the corners like so. Watch carefully how the edges and corners are done in the following photos.

Now we break out the Aleene's Tacky Glue for this part, because we're sticking fabric to fabric here (the spray glue is only on the box).

Now look at that beautiful seam!

Trim your corners like so:

Now use Aleene's Tacky Glue to stick the fabric down to the inside of the box:

Now you have nice finished corners:

Next, cut the handle like this:

Use Aleene's Tacky Glue to stick the fabric down to the inside of the box:

The fabric outside is complete! Now I used old dictionary paper to line it, like so:

You have to take special care to make a piece to fit around the handle:

Perfect:

I'm of the opinion that spray adhesive is the best choice for gluing paper, almost every time. Lots of people would use Mod Podge for this step, but I almost NEVER use Mod Podge because it always wrinkles paper. Spray adhesive won't give you wrinkles, but it's unforgiving: you have to lay the paper just right on the first try. Here I am about to spray all the book page bits:

Here's how I've laid them out:

Now I rip off the excess paper and the inside is complete!

Now to seal the inside to try to stop the papers from lifting at all from the spray adhesive.

Even after the spray varnish, you can see this section is lifting. It had to be glued down with Aleene's.

As you can see, I tried to include as many illustrations as possible. Also in this photo, you can see that I experimented with whether the fabric should come over the paper on the inside or not. I decided it's better with the paper coming all the way to the top on the inside, so that's what this tutorial shows.

Then I decorated with ribbon, label holders, and stamps! The bottom box isn't stamps but images I printed from The Graphics Fairy and used a heat tool to transfer to the box. It didn't work super well so I had to go over them with a ballpoint pen.

There you have it! A cheap but beautiful fabric-covered box, made with love!

I've been working on making over the pantry area of my kitchen... click the image to see restyle of these shelves and a makeover of this dresser, as well as a new labeling system and printable labels!