Earlier this week at work, I was looking for an easy craft to offer to my group of community crafters, ahead of the relaunch of our regular craft workshops. I had a lot of colourful raffia in the office, left over from another project, so I Googled simple crafts using raffia. One of the first to come up was making a woven basket. A little simpler, but using the same concept, was making a woven mat. I decided to give this a try, and aimed to make a small roundel the size of a coaster.
The video tutorial I found on Youtube can be found here. The video shows you how to continue the process to weave an entire bowl, but you can amend how you weave to keep the pattern flat, as a coaster or mat.
The raffia I had was this colourful kind, which I had bought here. If I do this craft again I’d like to try and source my raffia from a craft supplier, but this was purchased through work, so Amazon had to do!
This type of raffia was made up of lots of coloured strands lightly stuck together – lightly stretching it loosened the strands from one another giving me individual lengths of coloured raffia, which is what I used to wrap and weave. The video above suggests using natural, undyed raffia as the ‘core’, as it won’t be seen under the colourful wrappings. As I only had this kind, I just used a length of the multi-coloured, semi-stuck-together raffia as my core.
Fortunately, I already had a blunt sewing needle from a previous craft kit, so I used this when weaving my coloured strands around the core. At first I thought this was going to be way too fiddly, but once I had the process going and was building up the pattern, it definitely got easier.
This craft was actually really therapeutic: it was a nice activity to do while listening to a podcast or watching a video, or to do in the garden for a little bit of time away from a screen. I went around with each colour in turn, merging into the next colour as is shown in the tutorial. My ‘stitches’ certainly weren’t as regular and neat as in the video, but I don’t think this matters as the end result still looks pretty!
I don’t know if I’ll use this mat as a coaster, as liquid will probably cause the raffia to pull apart. Perhaps just as a hanging decoration? I definitely recommend this craft and will make another one soon, maybe even attempting to make a bowl!
Nellie Cole 