Fabric bowls are not only a fantastic way to burn up your scraps but they’re super
fun and easy to make. Now I’ve got a couple tricks in my tutorial today to teach you how
to use a finished edge and a small stitch to make a really clean looking fabric bowl.
Let’s get started.
As I said you can certainly burn up your scraps using this but I wanted to show off one of
my favorite pre cuts here, the color strata roll. This is a solid cotton couture from
Michael Miller. And this bowl here your looking at is actually consumed half of my entire
pre cut roll there. Now as I teach you today, keep in mind you can always add in more cording
or more fabric to make your bowl more bigger and bigger and bigger. I want to walk you
through some of the basics. And what I did for those basics was I took my roll. I opened
it up. I put it in an order of color that I really liked. And then I simply took and
I cut the folds out of all of my fabrics so that I started working with what would be
about a 22 by 2 ½ inch strip. Now one of the things I wanted to do was make a continual
set like I would with my binding, right? Of the fabric to wrap around the cord so that
I wasn’t adding a piece, adding a piece to this set to keep no raw edges. It can be
a little cumbersome so having a nice piece of velcro to wrap around to help hold it in
place like this is going to be very handy for you. You’ll need a couple because we’re
going to do with same with our cording.
But we’re going to build this by taking a bias join. Again we don’t want this to
get bulky. And if you’re not much of a quilter yet in your life I’m going to teach you
how to do this bias. It’s real simple. You’re going to take your right sides of your fabric
and you’re going to set them together. We’re using solids so I’ve got the first two perfect
don’t I? Now from there I’m just going to stitch a line across here. So it lays like
this and then I’m going to stitch a line across here and that will form a bias union.
And then I just join all of my little 22 inch pieces all the way down until I have a wonderful
color order. Now management is the key to the fabric bowl the way I’m going to teach
you. And so what I really want to show you, in this bowl, look carefully. We’re going
to go from blue at the beginning and we’re going to come all the way through to the pink
and then back out to the blue. So I actually took one rotation and another rotation of
color. And you can see that I’ve made them. We’re going to start with our blue. Go into
our pink. Once we get down to the pink we can splice on this new tail and keep going.
The reason I did that is these are easier to keep in my hand while I’m wrapping the
cording. If you have a big bulky one it just becomes a bit cumbersome. And it’s the wrapping
that becomes time consuming and so I want to make it as efficient as possible. So I”m
going to put this on later onto this as we build the bowl. So that’s just the bulk
management. And then also with our cording here I have about ten yards of cording . I
won’t use that much but I could, right? And I also have it trapped and wrapped in
the velcro. And while I’m working on this, this is actually kind of sitting below the
table and as I come and create twist in my cord, I can see this spinning below me. The
weight of that spins below and helps keep the cord from twisting up. Because that is
one of our adversaries today. We do not want our cord to get too twisted. So I’m going
to take a couple more folds in here real quick just so I’m nice and ready to go. And I
don’t believe I told you but this was that 2 ½. It’s been pressed so that the right
sides would be facing out on both sides.
Now to start you want to have a nice clean cut. And I”m not using the laundry cord.
I find that’s a very dense cording and it works wonderful. But because I wanted to use
a little bit thicker cord I went with a cotton covered, or excuse me, it’s like a poly
wrap on a cotton. You use it in piping in pillows. It’s very soft. It’s very squishy
and very, very easy to stitch through. And that’s one of the reasons I made that choice.
So when I’m dealing with getting ready for my wrap, what I’m going to do is I’m going
to take that clean cut and I’m going to set it inside of my finished part, fold it
over. And I’m going to pinch real quick. Now before I go any further I want to make
sure I have a couple of my little wonder clips handy because as I start to come around the
top, I’m going to get about two twists in here. And the first few inches, yes I am twisting
up the cord as well because it’s very easy to untwist. You can actually start to see
that happen there. Now I”m going to let the cord hang off of the table. I find it’s
actually easiest to sit while you do this so I’m going to do the same.
And now what I’m going to do is I’m going to start to twist and then I feed my pile
of fabric as I go. See how easy that works. And what this does is it keeps all of our
fabric tail and our cording from getting double twisted around down at our feet. What I like
to do is go ahead and wrap this until I’ve maybe made it through two or three color changes
so about 40 inches of fabric it will equal about 12 inches of wrap. And then I’ll show
you how to start your coil and begin doing your bowl. And reminder as I’m working on
this a little bit. This technique is awesome for rugs, it’s awesome for placemats, trivets.
Anything like that. It doesn’t have to curl up. We can do these nice and flat as well.
And I think I stalled just long enough to show you my next trick. So I’m going to
put another wonder clip here to hold it so that I can undo my velcro. And I’m going
to let out to the next color. There’s the next color starting. The smaller fabric tail
the easier it is to manage, ok? Then I take the wonder clip back off and as I’m wrapping
my cording I’m not wrapping it super tight. And the reason I don’t wrap it super tight
is after a few hours of doing this you might find that your fingers get a little tired.
Not to discourage you from doing a good job. But what I’m trying to say is if you wrap
it super tight from the beginning you’re going to want to keep wrapping it super tight
at the end and your hands may be a little tuckered out on your first bowl. So don’t
wrap it super tight so you can just have a nice easy start and finish as you go.
Alright as we get this last little wrap around here I’m going to go ahead and pinch this
off and hold that there. Now we’re going to need a few of our little straight pins.
And what we’re going to do, we can take the end clamp off. It’s not going to get
away from us. And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and start to
coil this into a little ball, pretty tight in the coil. And I have those pins handy because
in a few seconds it’s going to feel like I just can’t hold onto it much longer. And
so in order to secure it I want to go ahead and put a pin or four through as many of the
coil as I can. Be careful not to let that come through and hit you in the finger or
thumb on the other side. But this is going to help us secure it until we get over to
the sewing machine.
Ok so now we are ready to approach the sewing machine with our coil. One of the things I’ve
also learned to do at this point is I need to get myself a little bit more working room
here. So I’m going to go ahead and re-wrap my fabric one more time. I’ve got my cord.
And now we’re going to move over to the machine. Now I’m hoping that you have a
stiletto handy because it might help on these first few stitches. And at this point you
can also bring the weight of your cord onto the table again as well. I want you to make
sure that your cording is coming off the right side of the bowl that way the coil itself
will start to build on the left side. Eventually this bowl is going to end up building like
this. And so we cannot fit it usually under the machine this side. So I want you to build
it up this way. And the trick is having the cording come off of your right hand. We’re
going to get deep into the middle. Some machines have a presser foot extra lift so I’m actually
pushing up higher on there. We’re going to have to get a little western with this
every now and again. And see I’ve got it basically really thick. And I did that on
purpose. What I want to teach you to do is squish this down as a trick. Or some machines,
if you can get them in the cycle where the feed dogs go down enough then we can start
to slide it in, get it there and bring it right back up and sneak it underneath there.
Ok be careful not to push on your needle too hard. And this is the most difficult part
of the entire project, the first few minutes of sewing. Once we get around this little
coil, it is super easy and fun and you can just sit at your machine and enjoy doing a
little wrapping, a little stitching, a little wrapping, a little stitching. On these first
few moments, deep breath, stiletto in hand. I’m going to be able to use my stiletto
in here almost like a steering wheel because it’s such a small amount of area I’m working
in.
Ok here we go. If you have needle down on your machine, engage needle down. Polyester
thread and a four millimeter zig zag with about a two millimeter stitch length is what
I’m using today. And you can see I’m using that stiletto to just coil around that center.
Oop and I just hit that pin. So let’s make sure I come up nice. Ok we’re good. Like
I said we’re going to take these first few laps really slow, ok? And at a point like
this we might need to take and feed the body of our coil back around, ok? And we’re down
here. This is going very nicely here. Coming around. Now what I’m going to do is I’m
going to stitch till I’ve got a couple of inches worth of that fabric tail on the table
for me. As I come around my coil here. I’ll cut my threads out of the way later. And this
is going to be a great place to stop here in just a second. Let’s just get past this
other pin. Perfect. Ok. Easy. Now let’s get these pins out of the way for the rest
of the day. We don’t need them any longer. This is going terrific. And now what we’re
going to do is we’re going to let the cord go back down and just hang off of the table.
It’s not touching the ground. We want that so that it spins. And then I’m going to
take off my wonder clip, keep it handy.
And I’m going to start to wrap and loop my fabric over, wrap and loop my fabric over.
Now earlier I mentioned that I cut my strips into two 22 inch strips. And the reason we
do that is just so that the colors change faster in the bowl. You can certainly use
44 inch strips. And again like I said, these were traditionally done with all kinds of
scraps. What I think is important is we do join those on the bias so that they don’t
get too lumpy as we’re working. Ok, I’m just going to do a little bit of this because
I have another bowl that is almost finished and I’ll be able to show you how it’s
finished here in just a second. But I want to teach you how we wrap at the machine now.
It’s a little more cumbersome. And I just do one wrap at a time. And again I’ll go
out about six, eight, ten inches. You’ll find where it’s comfortable for you. And
you’ll probably find that after you do it a little bit longer you’re able to run your
cording out a little further and be able to control it nice. So I’ve gotten this wrapped
just enough here. And so what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and use one
of my wonder clips, hold that in place. And then I want to show you what I’m looking
at. If you look really close I’m looking at this gap in the presser foot and the way
that the two cords come together. That way I try to keep my two pieces centered and I’m
kind of pulling back on my cord a little bit here. And then the weight of the cording between
my legs also helps. Over time that’s going to help us increase our coil. So from here,
let me start wrapping while we’re talking about this. What we’re going to do is we’re
going to start to build out the center of our bowl because we’re making a bowl today.
If this was a trivet we just wouldn’t start to make the bowl shape upward. You can do
a wide one. You can do a narrow one. A steep bowl, a skinny bowl, whatever you like, but
that’s all based on how you begin your arcing. So what I’m going to do on this particular
one is a really deep dish, a deep bowl. And that starts by going soon from the coil right
into the elevation. I’m going to show you that and then we’ll show you how to finish
this bad boy off.
Because I’ve made several of these fabric bowls I did feel comfortable to wind off about
another, oh 14, 16 inches worth. And I also wanted to do this so I could hopefully show
you the curl starting to form. So as I’m doing this I’m going to start to put my
thumb in the center and pull upward. And I’m actually putting extra pressure out here on
my cord hand because that technically should shorten things up. I’m still watching that
gap between. And you can see here how the bowl is already starting to form. I do like
using a really narrow zig zag for this so I do have to be careful so that I make sure
I land as many stitches as possible. And I like to use a thread that kind of complements
or a variegated thread that will kind of add some fun accents. You most certainly can set
this up for a wide zig zag as well. That helps but you’ll show more of your thread color
that way as well. Ok. Ok so you can now see that the bowl itself has started to form just
by starting to slightly pull up on this. And I can make adjustments throughout the bowl
as I go. I want to show you how to finish the cording.
So I talked earlier about splicing on a new piece. Let’s say at this point it was time
to splice on a new piece. You’re simply going to go ahead and raise your needle up,
go ahead and slide this out. And you might have even had to set your machine back to
straight stitch so you could splice on a piece. That wouldn’t be a big problem. You would
just sew that on. And when you come back in just like we’re going to do now with this
bowl so I can show you how to finish these edges. You’ll simply just set it back up
in there and try to line up your actual zig zag stitches. And I like to go back about
an inch or so. And then from that we’re going to go ahead and come forward. Now at
this point I have my clips off. I’m going to wrap the rest of my tail. And you don’t
want the end to turn out too sloppy looking. We do have a raw edge on the very end of our
bowl so we have to deal with that. So when I am about, let me see how can I show all
of you at home the best . I’m going to rotate the bowl out of the way. So when I’m about,
oh an inch and a half away from the end, what I want to do now is I want to come in here
and I want to cut my cord. So let’s put one of these clamps, put our little third
fingers in place there. Let’s cut this cord out of the way, ok? Now what that does is
it gives us the opportunity to wrap around here once. And then as I come around of this
raw edge I can start to fold it under like yay. And now I can catch all of the raw edge,
wrap it around. And I’m going to stick another pin through and down into the cord a little
ways. And I’m also going to clamp it just for extra security. Now we’re going to roll
the bowl back into place so I can see what I’m doing. And we’re going to just smoothly
stitch on this last row as we go here. Nice and smooth. And now at
this point what I want to do is I’m going to use that stiletto again, let’s get our
clip out of the way first. And I’m going to try to control and roll that raw edge.
Sorry that I’ve got so much of my big manly fingers in our way here today. But I’m going
to roll now that raw edge underneath. As I get closer I’m going to worry a little bit
more. And as we just come in here very delicately, sometimes pinning. You can see I ended up
sliding another pin in the last little tail of the cord to hold it. That stiletto is a
great tool. And then just sew off a little bit.
Oh now, you see that doesn’t take nearly as long as I expected it to. These bowls are
fantastic. And I better get started on another project soon. I don’t know how much time
there is. We’ll catch you next time at Man Sewing.