Basket Kit

Watch the video here.

This week for the video I am showing how to put the basket kit together that I purchased at the local mini show. I am not saying that I am by any means an expert at this process. In fact as I stated in the video I have never put one of these together before. I am in fact learning as I make the video. I haven't gotten any insider hints from the maker of the kit or any other special help. I wanted to go into the video as green as anyone else would.

This kit is made by Milestone Miniatures (http://www.milestoneminiatures.com)

The cost of this kit was $9, and my only regret is that I only got one. I think I will be ordering at least another one soon. There are 11 basket kits on the website, 3 of which are ½” scale. I saw all of the different baskets made up at the show and they are all so cute and would fit into so many scenes.

If you aren't into making baskets the website also has many already made minis for you to shop for also. I can say all the items I have seen in person are delightful and would be wonderful to add to any dollhouse.

The kit itself is consists of: a wooden shape for the bottom of the basket, a small sheet of paper that is laser cut for the basket parts, some wire, a wood turning (part of the handle), a toothpick, and the sheet of instructions. The sheet does have a nice photo of what the basket should look like when I am finished.

The instructions list the following tools that will be needed to complete the kit: Exacto knife, small straight scissors, glue, cutting mat, ball stylus, and stain or craft paint.

The instruction sheet also introduces the important terms that we need to know to follow the instructions.

Completion of the basket requires 8 step and all are fairly easy to understand. I do wish there had been some illustrations for a few of the steps but I was able to figure them all out without them so I guess that they aren't really needed.

I did find that the pieces were easy to cut apart on the perforations left by laser cutting. My piece had one small area that didn't want to cut on the line but other than that it cut very easily.

I made the mistake of not reading ahead in the instructions but caught myself almost immediately.

The weaving is really easy, especially with the help of the toothpick. At the end I did change to a thinner toothpick that I had on hand but could have easily finshed just as well with the one included.

I did use another toothpick to apply the glue, that is my preferred method of glue application and it worked very nicely on this kit.

I didn't have either of the colors of stain on hand that were recommended so I used one I did have. I think these baskets would be really nice done with many different finishes. There are some ideas in the list of instructions.

After my stain dried I felt the paper still looked like paper so I painted the entire basket with some light brown/tan (Americana craft paint in Cocoa) let that dry and then re-dipped into the wood stain. I like this color much better.

The next step is to assemble the handle. For this we need to fold the length of wire in half and twist it. Then this wire is to be cut into 2 pieces and glued to the handle. The instructions state that the wire should be glued into the hole in the wood turning. Problem, my wood turning had no hole, I got out a small drill bit (3/64”) and added a small hole to each end. I am not sure how far into the wood turning the hole should go. I didn't want to go too far and split the wood so mine is a just a little divot. Hopefully this will work out okay. I actually used 3 types of glue in combination to attach this wire to the wood, my G-S Hypo cement (which states it is a jewelry glue) some Tacky glue and a bit of CA (super glue) just for extra assurance.

Okay, forget that last part, that was what I did on camera but it failed totally. I tried a couple of different methods and found that the super glue by itself held the best.

Would I buy another kit like this? Definitely! I love the kit and except for the handle it was really easy to do. I am sure I will be ordering more kits in the near future and really hope to see the kit maker at the next mini show I attend.