New as of today and yesterday. It has been about a year since my last adventures in basket-making from willows grown on my property. I only other touched basketry one other time (officially – unless you count the South of England-ish style hedgerow fence that I extended by some 600 feet this Spring, the top of which has very woven, very basket-y implications) since then, in making a flat reed farmer’s market style shoulder basket with straps. I did that one from a pattern, and the regularity of the materials was of great assistance.

On this one I did yesterday, I used only a book as reference, and things didn’t go perfectly. Especially because I didn’t adapt well my materials on hand to the needs of this type of basket-making. In other words, I still don’t know what I’m doing, but as you can see, I’m getting a little better each time.

I ended up screwing up the top edge on that with having vertical stakes that were really much too thick and stiff still. When I tried to lay them down, they just cracked or bent in the wrong place, making it irregular and not that good. So I clipped those, and opted to just wrap up the top edge with an improvised weave. It does the job, and like all of these early errors/prototypes, it has its own irregular charm. But this next one I did today after watching some videos seems like a big improvement:

From watching the videos, I started to get a better sense of where to clip off the extra bits that were too stiff or not well-suited to the task at hand, and I was able to more consciously and carefully control the weave and its packing as I went on.

There is still a fair bit of cracking going on, but I just bought a wallpaper steamer in order to be able to skip or shorten soaking times… On the first go round, I waited nearly two weeks for my rods to be ready, but they weren’t really still. So they got steamed, and then some of the remainder from the first basket got steamed again. Then much of the batch for the second basket only ever got steamed, and never got soaked at all. Some of it cracked, but some of that I was able to hide a bit in the weave, and the rest is, well, lessons learned.

My first objective really at this point still is just simply to be able to get regular forms in more or less predictable dimensions, and just be able to sit down and knock a basket out in one shot in maybe an hour or less. These both took significantly longer, but it’s also a question of building up muscle memory, and knowing how to pick and prep the stock to make your life as easy as possible moving forward.

I don’t have a ton of dried materials, but I’ve got a fair bit of green. My experience last year though was that green is often even more cracky, but I guess it probably depends on the quality and condition of the material you have, as this basket maker from the Isle of Man, John Dog – who I learned from today, and who this second pattern is based on – seems to be using purely green willow in this series, which I’ll include all the parts of below.

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