DIY Wooden Laundry Hamper - Tutorial

I always wanted a good sturdy laundry basket for my new home. The market is flooded with so much of plastic stuff and I didn't want to dump my home with plastics.Wooden furniture's are very costly in our place. To make it more cost effective, yet strongly built, this weekend I tried to make a wooden laundry hamper at home. As usual my gorgeous husband was very helpful in buying the materials and assembling the hamper.

Things needed:

1. Packing wood bars - 2.5 Ft length X 8 pieces; 18 inch length X 11 pieces; 

2. 2" nails, 1" nails and 1/2" nails - as required

3. Sand paper

4. Wood polish

5. Clear or stained varnish

6. Hammer

7. Small handy hacksaw

8. Wood glue

Where to buy:

To be more cost effective, I have choosen packing wood for this project. You can use either fresh wood or used wood like i did. The used packing woods are the ones which are disassembled from the wooden pallets used for packing and transporting of goods. In chennai, the entire strech of road between Ashok nagar police station and Lakshman sruthi signal is filled with shops selling used pallet woods. One can also find shops selling other timber varieties. I got my measurement ready before i went to the shop for wood. We need to be careful in picking our wood without stains, holes and with less nail marks. These woods are sold @ Rs 30 / Kg. We picked up our wood bars and asked them to cut the bars to the above dimensions. The wood was weighing 6 Kgs and costed us Rs. 180. Here is how the wood looks like.

The rest of the things can easily be obtained from hardware shops.

Lets get started:

Take two 2.5 ft wood bars and nail them together as shown in the picture. Dont forget to apply wood glue before you nail 2 wooden pieces (I forgot this while doing)

Do as above with the remaining 6 bars. At the end you should be having 4 'V' shaped bars. These 4 pieces will be the support pillars. Form a square frame with 4 pieces of 18" length. Close the center gap with 3 pieces of 18" length as shown in the picture below.

The upper portion which is clean will look like

This will be the bottom cover portion of the hamper which holds the laundry load. 5" is marked on each of the four V shaped pieces which we made earlier. At this marked point the above bottom piece is nailed to the V shaped pillar pieces. At the end, this 5" gap which we left will be the ground clearance space. The remaining 4 pieces of 18" length is nailed to the V shaped pillar pieces on the top. Please note that we need to reduce the length of the 18" piece by 2 X width of the wooden bar for 2 pieces. For me the width of each bar was 1cm, so I had to reduce 2cm from each of the two 18" piece using a hacksaw. Follow the below pictures to assemble the rest of the project.

Assemble and nail the wood pieces slowly and the half done laundry hamper will look like

You can either sand the individual wood pieces and then proceed to assemble or assemble the bars till this level and then sand it. Don't hurt yourself while nailing and cover your face while sanding, applying wood polish and varnish.

The completion of this laundry hamper will be continued in the next post as I have done only till stage. The sides can be covered by anything like wood sticks, coir rope, cotton rope, nylon rope, net or nylon straps. I'm planning to use nylon straps to cover the sides. 

How to make a concept model using Paper Mache

Have you ever wondered how paper mache can be so handy in making some of the projects for kids. Well, i'm not going to explain how to make paper mache as there are lot of tutorials in the web for it. I'm going to share how i made my son's play school project. Hmmm, the topic given for my son's annual project was " We are One", it was not simple as well as not complicated. I got 2 weeks to complete this project and submit for evaluation. 

I used to wonder whether these projects are for the kids or is it for the parents. My son was hardly 3 yrs old, what will he understand by this topic  "We are One". It took me 2 solid days googling to understand what needs to be done. Even i tried to explain him about unity, but he never understood anything. Thats a different story. 

After googling i found a lot of examples with globe, peace dove, peace flag, hand and people. So i taught of placing a globe in 7 hands. The 7 hands represent 7 continents and i decided to paint each of them in different colour to show diversity. Unity in diversity is portrayed with 7 coloured hands holding 1 globe.

Now, the concept looks good but where do i get the hands and globe. I thought of using plaster of paris for moulding, which will turn out to be a heavy project. All of a sudden my idea bulb was bright with paper mache. 

Materials used

1. News paper strips

2. PVA glue ( Fevicol MR or SR )

3. Surgical gloves

4. Plastic ball

5. Acrylic colours

6. Satin ribbons (7 colours)

7. Thermacol sheet

8. Flag stickers ( countries of the world )

9. Match sticks

10. World map

All the above materials are easily available. The surgical gloves are made of latex and can be blown as a balloon. All the 7 gloves were blown to the optimum size of a hand and tied with strings. I diluted PVA glue in water, made news paper strips and kept it ready for paper mache project. Each blown glove was wraped with news paper strips dipped in the glue and the hand shape was maintained. Once the whole glove was fully covered, it was left to dry for 24 hrs undisturbed.

7 such hands were made and after drying they were painted with acrylic colours. The continents were cut out from the world map. Each continent piece was placed on the plastic ball and an outline was drawn to mark the continents. Then the continents were painted with acrylic colours.

On the thermacol sheet these hands were palced in a circular form and stuck using PVA glue (undiluted). Once the hands were in place the ball was palced on the fingers of the hand and glued. 

Satin ribbon was tied around each hand as a decoration and different country flags were palced around the globe. This project got second prize in the school annual day function. 

How to make a model house with ice cream sticks

My Son's Dream house for school project

There are a lot of crafts that can be done with ice cream sticks, like photo frame, basket, vase, lamp shade etc. But i was not bothered about this amazing craft material untill my son was assigned with a school project last month. The project is to make a dream home. I was thinking of various materials like cardboard, chart paper, thermacol etc. When i googled, there was a lot of house models and  to my surprise some of them were made by ice-cream sticks. This triggered my idea bulb..

Materials used in this project:

1. Ice-cream sticks 

2. Hot glue gun 

3. Thermacol sheet - for base

4. Green coloured garbage bag

5. Good quality sturdy Scissors

Places i got my materials:

Ice-cream sticks, glue gun, scissors and thermacol sheets are easily available in any craft store. I bought my sticks from Pandian stores @ T.Nagar, Chennai. I love this shop, most of the materials are reasonably priced and the staffs are friendly. 50 sticks were bundled together and sold @ Rs. 7 / bundle, pretty cheap compared to other shops which sold @ Rs. 15 / bundle. I ordered my glue sticks through Amazon.in and for the green colored garbage bag, i had them stocked in my home and it came handy.

Building of the house:

This model was my dream home which i wanted to construct in the future. The sticks were placed next to each other and hot glue was applied on them. First the base was formed. The sticks were cut to the desired length and all the walls were formed with the sticks. Then the walls were stuck to the base with the hot glue. Fevicol(PVA glue) was not used because of its longer sticking time. Hot glue instantantly binds.

 The model house was placed on cardboard and thermacol sheet and fence was fixed. For the grass, green coloured plastic garbage bags were folded and striped as small as possible as confetties. PVA glue was mixed in water and using a small sprayer(i have used an empty Colin bottle for spraying purpose), sprayed the glue water on the thermacol base where grass is required. The green confetties are then sprinkled over the glue sprayed area. This will take atleast 1 to 2 hours to dry.

It took 2 days (excluding material buying time) and 900 sticks to complete this project. My son loved this house and it was considered as one of the best dream house models in his school. Hope we construct a similar real home in the near future.