So...after seven weeks of living on a bike seat by day and in a tent by night, I returned home with a hyperactive nesting instinct, a burning desire to reorganize and an inexplicable urge to make all my own food from scratch. I baked a nice fresh loaf of bread, whipped up a batch of granola, made some yogurt, deep-cleaned my apartment and started getting rid of extraneous odds and ends. Among them, copious amounts of cardboard boxes, which, like egg cartons, had seemed too full of potential to give up. I also decided that I needed, once and for all, to buy a hamper to corral my dirty clothes which usually remain strewn about the floor in the back room until I gather them up for laundry day. This is not how adults live! After a trip to a few home stores, I discovered that the woven hamper I was looking for was much too expensive. AHA(moment)!: Cardboard, hamper...Hamper, cardboard...a cardboard hamper!
I began cutting my flattened boxes with an exacto and ruler into weavable strips. In order to make them long enough, I enlisted the help of my new favorite material: brown paper tape (many thanks to Zachariah Durr, cardboard builder extraordinaire, for cluing me into the stuff). You wet the adhesive side with a damp sponge and voila! It is a super strong bond that blends right into that lovely cardboard brown. Well, I personally think it's lovely. The half circle you see is the piece I cut out for the bottom so that the hamper would sit right up against the wall.
Next, I glued an even number of strips *important for weaving* to the base in a radial fashion so that they could be bent upright and form the vertical slats of the weave (please forgive the dizzying angle of this photo).
Once all the side strips were in place, I bent them upward, secured a horizontal strip to one of the back slats and began weaving around and around. The first few rows were the most difficult because all the strips were unruly and flopping around willy-nilly, but as the basket took shape the weaving became much easier.
I continued adding strips to the weaving with paper tape until the basket was just about waste-height. I trimmed the extra length of the vertical strips and finished of the top edge of the basket with a layer of paper tape to give it a nice clean look.
Last but not least, I sewed a simple bag out of an old tablecloth to line the hamper. When it's full, I pull the whole bag out, throw it over my shoulder and joyfully make my way down to the laundry room!
