the shopping basket

Now, ideally, the shopping basket would be of metal mesh!

So I sketched out this little pattern on a memo pad that I had from somewhere....

 Then I took out this wonderful metal mesh that I got at Dollarama...

 Cut the pattern out....

 Taped it to the metal mesh...

 And cut it out...

 Released it from the pattern....

 Looking good! A bit bigger than I thought it should be but okay...

So I tried a couple ways to 'glue' the corners together - none of which worked. And it was too large anyway...so then I thought I should try to make it smaller and put tabs on the corners and try to adhere the overlap...but working with the mesh just didn't work. Well, to be honest, I might have been able to make it work but I was anxious to get this finished VBG.

Then I decided to go with a red 'plastic' shopping basket.

Scaled down the pattern a bit, added the tabs to glue the corners together and transferred the pattern to some red cardstock from my stash.

Here it is cut out and folded with the tabs for gluing:

Before I glued it, I used a pushpin to make holes for a handle. (SO much easier to do that now than after it's glued together.)

When the glue had dried, I coated the outside with about three coats of clear nail polish to give it a plastic look:

Then I took a piece of wire , put it through the first hole, folding back about 1/4" on the outside then following the left hand side of the basket to the corner, making a 90 degree angle, following to the end of the basket, another 90 degree angle to the right as far as the bottom hole, cutting the wire that extra 1/4", putting that through the second hole then folding the wire back against itself.

After the handle was in place, I added a small strip of dimensional medium to the middle of the top of the handle and after that dried, I painted it with red nail polish.

I should have made two or three of these to add to the shop (especially since I had designed this so it would stack) but I didn't.