Weaving without a loom- Bento Bag

Today the third post of my little series about weaving adventures! (First one with general explications here, second one about weaving without a loom here). I use the book Weaving within the reach as an inspiration to try out different techniques – this week I made a last experiment to weave without a loom.

I made the “Twill Tape Bento Bag” from the book:

I find the idea fascinating to make something in this material. Twill Tape is a flat twill-woven ribbon that it’s used normally to bind straight edges or to reinforce seams, make casings, bind edges. I never thought of another use before but discovered that the herringbone motif on the ribbon is quiet nice and that I love the woven effect of the ribbon for this bag.

It’s by the way  a simple Origami bag Pattern, that I used before here. A very versatile and easy pattern as you see.

Have to admit nevertheless that this one wasn’t always a pleasure to do…. the weaving part is easy, you weave simply a rectangle with your ribbons… the difficult part is to sew the ribbons together in order to create a stable fabric. In the book is recommended to make this by hand and finally I regret I haven’t done that. I used my machine instead as it seemed much faster, but I’m not sure it really was. First my machine had many troubles to sew the ribbon. It’s surprisingly sturdy and when you fold it over three times my machine doesn’t wanted to sew through all these layers. I changed even the needles, but it was awkward to do. And it’s not neat by machine, nothing to do, it’s ugly. So, little hint if you want to do this bag: sew it by hand! It will be much neater and lovelier! Believe me!

But even with the ugly finishing I did, I think this bag has a real potential to become a nice and special project bag… perhaps I’ll redo it once more and do all the sewing by hand and perhaps a little bigger… someone has some additional time to sell, please??