I don’t know about you but I haven’t quite gotten into the Christmas spirit yet. I do like to make my gifts when possible but some years I just give up and give out gift cards, much to the relief of my family, I am sure. Anyway I am not sure yet what kind of holiday this this one will be but last year I was quite silly and creative. (At least I like to think so) I deemed the holiday to be called “Wildly Impractical Christmas,” and as such I was able to give away quite a few of my crazy hand made jems.

There was the toilet paper family tree, a mini bar chess set, the woven mustache purse, the giant quilled paper bowls, a quilled paper purse and this giant woven paper hamper.

I love to work with magazine paper to upcycle new items. It is such a forgiving material and it can be easily manipulated. Best of all if you make a mistake there is plenty more material to be found.

I don’t have an actual step by step of this project as I made it almost a year ago but I do have a lot of pictures showing most of the process.

To start I cut some ovals from some scrap cardboard.

Then I used rolled magazine paper tubes and coiled them to cover the cardboard.

There was a lot of hot glue involved.

Once the oval was covered I flipped it over and glued more paper tubes all around the oval.

Then an other paper coil was glued to the other side.

This is the crazy spider looking thing I was left with.

So I was ready to start weaving. I chose to do a simple 1 x 1 weave.

I had a big can shape that I used as a pattern and also to help shape the paper weaving. Once I reached the top the can was removed.

To finish the top edge the tubes were trimmed and glue in place with hot glue.

The lid was also made from cardboard.

The handle was glued in and then covered with fabric on the inside of the lid.

The outside was covered with the coiled paper.

If you would like a few more details on rolling the paper and the weaving process please see my first paper weaving project a trash can made from trash. 🙂

Happy Upcycling,