During my reorganization (thanks to all the basket-making of the last few days) I found some super-stiff interfacing. Interfacing is a sort of roughened polyester or cotton/poly blend felt. Sometimes it’s very thin, for use in garments; sometimes it’s very thick, like this stuff, which served very nicely as a backing for the shell of another basket. Following on the recommendation from Grete Greensphon blog on Bernina’s website, I did some very basic quilting to attach the interfacing to the shell fabric of the basket. My learning about Zentangle, once upon a time, was somewhat helpful to me here; each of those black lines is a bit of stitchery (wow, did I just link to a post from five years ago? Yeah, I did — I’ve been at this Design stuff for a while).
As you might imagine, the resulting fabric basket has much stiffer walls than the others that I’ve made without interfacing. This is not nearly so collapsible a basket. It’s much more rigid and sturdy, and it’s not going anywhere. With a solid bottom and solid walls, it’s quite suitable for holding journals and sketchbooks that are finished… and because the basket winds up being deeper than wide, it means I can store a dozen or fifteen journals deep into the shelf, rather than horizontally taking up shelf-feet of room. Baskets do seem to be the way to store things on shelves.
