Basket 5: Brown Ash (part 4)

I've been lucky to spend all of my Fridays this month with Northwood's Village Day program, where I got to join these kids as they also tackled basket-weaving. They'd been pounding logs and splitting splints over the past several weeks in parallel with my own process, and coming together for the final steps was an unexpected treat.

I wanted to make a basket without holes in the bottom (difficult to do when weaving sturdy uprights), so I used this method from Peter Follansbee. It worked well, although weaving the first row was then a bit confusing because there was no over-under pattern to work with on two of the sides. So the bottom edges of my basket are a bit gappy.

I'm in love with the glossy ribboned weavers.

Uprights that cross in front of the last weaver are snipped into points and tucked to the inside of the basket, under a weaver. Uprights that cross behind the last weaver are snipped flush with the top of the basket (hasn't been done yet, in the photo above). In hindsight, I should have let the basket thoroughly dry before soaking just the tips of the uprights and folding them over. The weavers shrank considerably as they dried, and I ended up having to awkwardly thread in a couple more thin weavers to fill the gap that was created.

The inner and outer rim make the basket considerably sturdier, even though I just used splints (instead a beefier rim of oak or maple). The uprights create a substantial and kind of messy-looking gap, which I filled with basswood cordage (too thin to actually fill the gap, but I had a limited supply of the fiber.

It's been pretty cool to see how lessons learned on one basket directly and dramatically impact the quality of the following baskets.

The small basket on the left was my first attempt. I learned about what sorts of bends were possible with uprights of a particular thickness, and I learned about the importance of keeping uprights parallel to each other while working up the basket.

The large basket was my second, and I learned about the challenges of a non-gappy bottom, and the significant shrinkage that happens when the wood is drying.

The pack basket benefitted from all of the lessons learned.