DIY Rope Basket – Easy Therapy Craft

This tutorial shows you how to make a stylish rope basket for the price of a bale of rope. It is a fun an easy project that is ideal to do with kids and also for therapy.

What you need

Soft Rope – Do not buy plastic coated rope for this project. You want a rope that bends easily.
Hot glue gun
Large plastic bowl for mold

Instructions

For this tutorial you will need a large plastic bowl to use as a base. You could freehand it but you will not get even layers. When I was finished I just scraped off the excess glue left behind on my bowl.

Start off your bowl by creating the centre. Be sure to add extra glue to the open end. You will slowly coil it around adding a little strip of glue each time. Don’t worry too much about being messy as you can pull off the dripping glue afterwards.

You will need to keep going until the bowl reaches a suitable height. I wanted my bowl to go higher than my plastic bowl so I just lifted it up as I worked.

Now for the handles. These are totally optional and I have included a couple of techniques for different designs.

To create the handle you need to snip the ends of the rope and pull the outside coating over to seal the end. Do this by pushing back the top layer of the rope then snip the rope ends (the white section in photo). Then push back the layer and glue it closed.

I made 3 different handles –

The Plaited handle – This was my favorite but it did involve a lot of ends. Simple make two plaited handles and then glue them in place.

The Circle –  This was created using the base of the bowl. It looked a little too modern for my style but you can see the example in the collage photo above.

The Loop – This is great if you want a modern style but still have the ability to lift your basket. This was created by leaving a loop in the middle.

Finish off your basket by tidying up any loose bits of glue. You could line your basket if you choose too also.