Woven Danish Heart Baskets - Wood Veneer/Leather/Stiffened Fabric/Foam

Another simple children’s craft - we’ve all made these from paper. But I’m hoping the laser will expand the possibilities a bit.

Things I wanted to try:

  1. Thin wood veneers - if they are flexible enough to bend for the weaving. (not sure yet)
  2. Thin and thick fabrics - stiffened slightly with either a commercial liquid stiffener, homemade fabric stiffener, or fusible facings before lasing (not sure about the iron-on stuff yet, the heat might cause separation)
  3. Thin to medium semi-flexible leathers and suede. (I can so picture this in leather!)
  4. Felts
  5. Foam
  6. Fruit Leather (probably going to get hungry sometime-grin!)
  7. Combination materials - (veneers bonded to heavy fabric backing?)

The design has an optional Engraved line at the center. If the material is stiff enough to hold a nice crease, you won’t need it. But it might be necessary for thicker stiff leathers and veneer to score the material for bending. (anyway I plan to experiment with it a bit - probably won’t work on fabric.)

Some examples:

Files:

Danish Heart Basket_thin material.zip (865 Bytes)

Danish Heart Basket_thick material.zip (866 Bytes)

Danish Heart Basket_thin_5 strand.zip (853 Bytes)

Danish Heart Basket_thick_5 strand.zip (869 Bytes)

These are the simplest of the weaves - If you’ve never done one before there are links to instructions and a video below. Basically you go inside (through) a loop and outside (around) the next loop to create the basket. (They’re a lot of fun.)

Instructions:

Vintage Image Craft

RedTed Art

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Nice! Also light engraving on alternating squares of the warp/woof to make a pattern or some text?

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Yep! That was the plan!
Matter of fact - these things should be flat enough initially to engrave a broad decorative pattern across the entire woven basket, if we can make veneers or backed veneers work with the weaving part.

(Think of a cool retro dot pattern, or a William Morris wallpaper.)

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I would think veneer would work, but maybe soaking the wood before weaving to make it more flexible would be an idea to try?

P.s. I :heart: William Morris!!

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Good idea!

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I have 8x10ish sheets of 1/32 and 1/40something wood veneer in a few different tree flavours. I know nothing about wood, so I can’t identify any of them, which isn’t very helpful, but some of them are definitely flexible enough for this kind of project without soaking. Assuming it could be glued along the edge and not creased.

Some of them are more brittle along the grain lines, but even those I think are still flexible enough as long as you aren’t trying to flex the wood in the wrong direction. I don’t know if I’m making any sense. Horrifically, this is me after learning a lot about wood from the forums. Lol.

6 Likes

Cool. Didn’t know these were called danish heart baskets (I’m danish myself) :slight_smile: A professor from my university created this generator that allows weaving in characters as well.

http://cs.au.dk/~gerth/julehjerter/

Page is in danish and does not translate well on google translate

Forsidetekst: Text on front
Bagsidetekst: Text on back
Forside: front
Bagside: back
Tilgængelige tegn: Available characters
Udskriv rød del: Print red part
Udskriv hvid del: Print white part

There is a bit of help text on the bottom allowing line change and such which translates fine on google :slight_smile:

14 Likes

Awesome! I like the personalization angle! :smiley:

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