Our local Blue Mountains museum asked me to run a workshop and we had 5 participants! Using Jon Ridgeon’s How to Weave a Willow Basket: A step by step project for beginners, I taught the steps of how to make a round basket. Such a wonderful group of woman, they are now our special group of founding alumnae! Their enthusiasm to take more classes and a long list of emails of others I have met at markets have inspired me to offer more workshops in 2019!
This Saturday I was back at the Branch Ranch to learn how to make willow ornaments! what a fun busy day learning from Jill & Jackie how to make all of these willow decorations! I found random weaving more difficult than following a pattern! I’d like to add little LED lights to some of these and make a herd of reindeer & add some antlers.
I finally got to take a workshop at the Branch Ranch with Jill and Jackie! They have designed this beautiful sculpture that supports peonies in a garden but also looks fantastic in a winter urn! It was a half-day workshop and we created these very large crowns.
The local museum curator found me some rolls of reed at a nearby Value Village, so this is my first attempt using them. I do prefer willow & dogwood to this floppy type of material but it is nice that you can dye it and it needs only 20 minutes of soaking to be ready to use. My mom & I dyed it with some leftover fabric dyes she had because my goal was to create a teaching aid. For my upcoming workshop, I would like to show participants the different types of weaving patterns that are possible.
Layers of patterns. See key.
On Thanksgiving Sunday, I participated in the Artisan Market at the Marsh Street Centre. I had a young apprentice for the day- Kahl worked steadily beside me crafting his own basket creation out my willow and Ethernet wire!
I was in the Clarksburg Artisan Market on the Thanksgiving Weekend. For this I added to my inventory a harvesting basket for the them of the weekend. It turned out well following Jon Ridgeon’s book, and I like the creative handles I made from the overlapping fresh heritage willow I used to make the frame. They are really comfortable and yet artistic. I learned to split the ribs from fresh willow too from Jon’s book.
See my favourite moment at the Artisan Market post too!
Those are our own heritage apples- different varieties harvested from our 13 trees.
At our local Beaver Valley Fall Fair, I entered three categories:
A garden ornament made of sticks and stones. I used fresh cut local heritage willow to weave the sphere and then added a variety of stones that come out of my digging up here inside the sphere. I sprayed clear coat on the rocks to bring out their beautiful colours like they look when they are wet.
Something useful from something useless. I entered a couple of my baskets made from Ethernet wire cut-off ends.
A craft made from wood not otherwise in another category. So I entered a Dogwood basket!
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