I finally pulled out one project from my UFO (unfinished object) stash and completed it. It’s the pink fabric bowl. There it was, under my sewing table, already wrapped and pinned, sitting for over a year. (Ahem.) All it needed was for me to sew it. How hard can it be?

Ready for duty

Not very hard and it didn’t take very long. And I just adore it. Now it sits by my computer and all my charging cords go into it. The pink bowl was an experiment: I wanted to see what size of bowl one fat quarter would make. I cut the pink batik fat quarter into 5/8-inch strips. I wrapped the cotton cord, gluing and pinning at the end of each strip. (You’ll see what happens when I didn’t pin in the middle for the blue and orange bowl.) And voilà, a lovely fabric bowl.

Inside

I was inspired. But instead of choosing another UFO, I decided to experiment again and make another fabric bowl. What would it look like, I wondered, if I serged the fabric edge with a rolled hem in a contrasting color? For the my second experiment, I used a dark blue tone-on-tone batik fabric and orange embroidery thread.

The blue and orange bowl started out as half a yard, cut into 1 3/4-inch strips (I think). I sewed the strips together end-to-end, making one long strip; this measured just over 11 1/2 yards. Then I ironed the strip in half length-wise and serged the raw edges. (This took quite a while.) The result was one long strip with one folded edge and one edge with a rolled hem.

Not to big, not too small

I wrapped the blue and orange fabric over the cotton cord. Actually, I had to wrap it twice. The first time I wrapped it, I hadn’t pinned the blue and orange strip anywhere other than the beginning and end because it was just one long strip. (There was no need to sew the pink bowl fabric strips together end-to-end, so they were wrapped around the cord separately with each end overlapping the next, glued and pinned in place.) The wrapping loosened up in several places while it was in queue and I couldn’t get the edges to tuck in. Rats! I had to completely unwrap it, uncoil the fabric and the cording and then wrap it again, with lots of pins this time.

What are fabric bowls good for, other than charging cords? I like them for keys, watches and bracelets; the fabric bowls are soft don’t scratch (or get scratched by) these items. They are good for lots of sewing tools and trinkets. Mostly they are fun to make.

So, that’s one UFO taken care of, about a gazillion more to go.