Thursday, February 18, 2010

17-18.2.10 A basket from rolled newspapers (canudos de jornal)

Following a visit to Arbel's very interesting blog "סיבוב נוסף", I was quiet enthousiastic of her basket weaving creations, especially the ones with the rolled newspaper (or newspaper canes) basket such as this one.

Then I got an email from my friend Pnina with a link for an Hebrew tutorial of basket weaving with newspaper canes. Of course, that was an immediate decision, the same day all preparations for the task were ready.
In fact, it happens to be a bad experience at first, since rolling newspaper sounds so easy, but actually requires a lot of skill in order to get a unified/even roll/cane from both sides.
I almost gave up, feeling really stupid not to manage rolling a cane of newspaper evenly, but I gave it another try the day after. I saw that one of the rolling techniques uses a skewer and that was very helpful to practice in order to get better looking canes.

The rest went more smoothly until the finishing of the basket. There is also a problem that I haven't solved yet, "how to connect the canes with the white plastic glue so that I won't have to wait ages but on the other hand - the connection will be stable enough?" Maybe using hot glue?
Maybe preparing a giant cane and let it dry 24 hrs? (nah...? too messy?!). I have seen somewhere that people use laundry hanger to hold the connection with the white glue, but that makes the work really slow, isn't it?

For the finishing, I tried the technique (I don't know its professional name) I learned in the basketweaving workshop with Yonit Crystal, but I couldn't remember it. Finally, I somehow recalled it and just later discovered that the technique showed in the Hebrew tutorial is much simpler, but wasn't clear from the explanation there ( it is folding the 2 cm warp edges simply backward or forward).

I have gathered here some interesting links on the subject in case you get hooked, so enjoy!
It seems that this craft is very popular in Brazil, where the term in Portuguese is apparently "Canudinhos de jornal".
My basket is not yet finished, but I have to decide how to continue:
  • Just go over with white glue
  • First paint it with acrylic and then go over with oil varnish
  • Spray it with some color
  • Leave it like this
???

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