In this tutorial I will show you how to make your own macramé basket using a plywood base and 4 mm natural cotton rope. The full video is at the bottom of this page.
You will need:
- A round shaped wooden base with holes on the sides
- 4 mm natural 3-strand/ply rope
- Scissors
- Tape measure
- Masking tape
- Brush, e.g. a pet brush
You can use any round shaped wooden base (oval or round, not square), the technique is the same. The amount of cords you need, and lengths, depend on how many holes there are in your wooden base, and how tall you want your basket to be.
In the video tutorial, I use a 10 cm round wooden base with 20 holes in it and my little basket measures about 14-15 cm in height. I cut 20 cords which are each 120 cm/48 in long. The cords become very short in the end which I personally like because there's not much left over to throw away, but if you don't want to fiddle as much with your cords you should cut them longer (maybe add 10-15 cm to each cord).
To make a taller basket, add length to each of your cords. Given that you use 4 mm rope, 2.5-3 cm extra height on the basket requires approximately 16 cm extra length per cord.
To make the basket, you will mainly be tying Square Knots. If you want more help with learning the Square knot you can check out my in depth video tutorials here.
Important! If your wooden basket has an uneven number of holes in it you need to add an extra cord to make sure you have an even number to be able to tie your rounds of Square Knots. The video shows you how this can be done in a neat way (06:00). You can also add extra cords in the same way just to make your basket a little wider than the base. In my oval shaped basket I added 3 extra cords because it had both an uneven number of holes, and the macramé started to constrict above the base so I added 2 more to make it wider. The photo below shows the oval shaped basket (15 x 10 cm wooden base) and the extra cords are circled.
Here is the full video tutorial:
Are you new here? My name is Fanny Zedenius and I run a fiber art business in Sweden called Createaholic. You can find my best selling book about macramé for beginners here as well as my two newer books, and you can check me out on Instagram here. On this website I sell all the supplies you need to get started on your fiber art journey - be it macramé, weaving, crocheting or something else! I also occasionally post new blog posts where I share some of the creative projects I work on.
I hope you'll like your stay here in my corner of the Internet!
Love, Fanny