A box for wool

While the majority of our belongings have been locked away in a storage facility back in England, we obviously have some stuff in our teeny apartment. This is an apartment where pretty much all of the storage is shelving, and where I seem to have managed to collect a surprising amount of wool for such a (relatively) short stay. I decided now was the time to do something about it, also bearing in mind that I know we'll have to be moving everything pretty soon now!

As we also have a very limited budget, and a huge stack of newspapers, picked up on the train every morning on my wife's commute to work, I decided to fashion something out of them. 

I started out by making lots of strips that I could weave together by folding individual pages into eight.

Then made a start on the weaving:

At this point I wasn't entirely sure how big I would make this wool box, so just kept going until I thought it looked the right size. This happened to be eight strips by ten:

Then time to make the sides:

After adding some more strips just by slotting them into each other, the box grew:

And grew:

Until I figured it was probably big enough. Big enough was eleven strips high, and then it was time to finish off the top edge. I did this by folding the ends of the strips into the middle of the uppermost horizontal strip and taping them down:

Main construction finished:

Then I decided to make a lining for the box so that the newspaper ink didn't get on the wool that'd go in the box 'cos that'd be no good. To do this, I just cut up a clear plastic bag to line the sides, and a square of a white plastic bag for the bottom, then taped them into place. The overlap of plastic at the top was then also folded into the middle of the top horizontal strip and taped down. To finish the box I taped the top edge up, and ta-da, done:

With wool in:

Those are 400g balls of wool, to give an indication of size, and the box ended up using ninety-three strips.