Introduction: DIY Food Cover

I needed a handy little temporary cover for when I have to keep food from being besieged by flies before, after and during serving. Of course I could've just bought one at the store in a jiffy, but I preferred the satisfaction of making my own.

Figured I'd take a few pictures and turn it in to an Instructable to the benefit of anyone with a similar need!

Step 1: Items Required

1. About 600 cm of binding wire
2. A reel of wool/thread/ribbon
3. A cloth of your choice (enough to wrap the entire structure).
4. Adhesive that works on cloth (I used Multibond.)
5. Scissors
6. Pliers ( to twist the wire)
7. Needle and thread (unless you'd rather use glue here too)
8. Whatever you'd like to decorate the cloth with (sequins, rhinestones...anything goes!)

Step 2: The Skeleton

I drew myself a sketch of what the frame of my cover would look like. The idea is to wrap the cloth around this skeleton and then glue and/or sew it in to place.

I aimed for a hemispherical cover of radius 15 cm. You can pick a size that suits your needs, of course.

I constructed the skeleton by first making the three horizontal rings, fixing two hemispherical arcs to the bottom most ring, and then adding on the next two rings. I fastened the rings and arcs in place at the joints as I went using wool. The photos should help visualise this.

To get a good circle, you could use a large enough cylindrical object to wrap the wire around. I also used the tile grouts on my floor (because they resemble crosshairs!) as a means of visually splitting the rings in to quarters, so that I could place the two arcs. Not the most accurate method, but one need not be very accurate in this case anyway :D

Photo 4 is a complete skeleton. I clipped off the extra wool dangling at the joints afterwards, for a neater look.

Step 3: The Skin

In my case, I used two layers of old cloth. This is because I wanted a slight green tinge to the translucent black cloth I put on top. You could always be more prudent and go with one xD

I pasted the first cloth (green) by applying adhesive on to the outside of the skeleton and then pressing the cloth on to it, folding where necessary. I left the bits sticking out at the bottom to deal with later.

When dry, I spread the black cloth over the structure such that there would be excess cloth all around. Then I pinched it at the apex of the hemisphere and raised it slightly and tied this finger-like projection with some wool to form an easy handle (as seen in Photo 5). Make sure that there's enough cloth to firmly cover the bottom of the structure on all sides when you do this!

I then cut the cloth around so that I could easily sew it in to place. I put stitches along the circumference of the lowest ring and folded the cloth neatly as I went around, as you can see.

Step 4: The Adornments!

Now it's purely aesthetics. I trimmed the excess cloth off the bottom and tied a ribbon over the wool I used for the handle. Pasted a few sequins and a flower from an old hair band to make things a little less boring.

Et voilà! One simple, unique food cover :) Doesn't score high on sophistication, but it does it's rather mundane job...at least it did at dinner tonight!

Step 5: