Fabric Bowls

I belong to a textile group called Nest of Makers - who are a very friendly bunch.  We get together and sometimes we do our own thing and sometimes we have a skill sharing session.  At our last meeting Heather Chalkley showed us how to make fabric bowls.  I've only ever made these using hand stitching before and that was very time consuming.  Heather showed us how to make them using a sewing machine and we made rapid progress.

Fabric ripped into strips and ironed - it's good to have more than one fabric

You need fabric + matching thread, polypropylene rope, a sewing machine, some pins and a small bulldog clip.

Polypropylene rope

Then away you go ...

Sewing in progress!

You can see how much rope is needed for one bowl!

By the end of the day there were some lovely bowls ready for use!

After our lovely bowling day I went home enthusiastic to make more.  I decided I would use neutral fabric and stitch with neutral cotton thread and dye them.  So that's what I did.  After dyeing them all over, I then inverted the bowls in a shallow dye bath to get a contrasting colour on the rim.

An undyed bowl

Finished bowls

Here's what I learnt ...

It's quicker to use patterned fabric to get a colourful result and you don't need that much!

If you put a wet inverted bowl in the dye bath you get a rim that is just the area covered by the dye bath.

If you put the inverted bowl in dry the dye rises much further up the bowl but you get a nice shading effect ..

If you don't like the colour you have some scope to change it

 

Blue with green

Becomes blue with black!

 
and it can be quite addictive ...

Lots of bowls

The printed fabric bowls have gone to new homes and after some more dyeing this is what I've ended up with in the dyed bowls line ... 

In the end I made 8 bowls and used about 50m of rope.  Hold on to your washing lines - they may not be safe with me about!