Worked on baskets in the quite moments and sold 9 over the weekend!
Artsburg is an juried annual show in our Blue Mountains indoors and outdoors in downtown Clarksburg each July.
Someone asked about a lower flatter round basket for serving crackers or chips, so I made this one over the weekend with a nice contrasting colour weave.
Getting Artsburg Festival inventory ready…
First attempt at baguette basket.
I met my daughter’s boyfriend’s parents last week, and his mother is a fantastic baker! She has her own bakery and would like to display her baguettes in a tall basket. We looked at some options on the Internet and like one similar to this first attempt. It is wider than the one on a restaurant supply site because mine flared out. They used a thick stick to be the asymmetrical side, but my three stakes bundled together could not stay straight. It does make mine somewhat different than the one I saw.
Airy swirl for fresh bread.
Ethernet wire baskets are good mobile projects for the car or travel!
We went camping for a few days to spend time with my daughter and her boyfriend’s family. It was so relaxing to weave a basket during the long car ride and then by the campfire. The break from home gave me a chance too to explore more technique variations with wire baskets.
I wasn’t crazy about the gap around the square start or the messy square itself.
But after the base was woven, I removed the square start to reveal and interesting pattern.
I used the same technique as before to twist French randing weavers up the stakes: Minimizes sharp end sticking out and strengthens the stakes.
French randing weavers ready to go!
I didn’t add waling, so my twist-up-the-stakes introduction of weavers created a lot of space along the edge of the base.
But by flaring the sides out as I randed, the gap closed in and created a nice footer rim.
Small stones and giant boulders that have all been dug out of our land here on top of the escarpment.
Okay, so sometimes I forget to soak my dry willow early enough in the week and have to be creative otherwise. This week I clipped my heirloom willow (the original willow here on our land- still don’t know what variety it is) and natural dogwood to make a basket out of this ‘green’ stuff.
It’s a struggle compared to lovely cultivated dried willow, but I also made it more challenging than need be! I was curious about starting a round base and then filling two sides with half moons of weaving to craft an oval. I was also trying for a rounded transition from base to sides so did no waling. Hence, the shape was difficult to work with.
Furthermore, I tried using long stakes from one side of the slate to the other so I had to tackle the border with thick butt ends and thin tips. AND I didn’t leave long enough ends of stakes to weave traditional borders. So In conclusion I have a truly rustic basket in shape, weave & material.
Since this basket is an ode to the heirloom willow and dogwood of the land, I have dedicated it to a rock collection. In it you will see the variety of rocks that come out of our soil. The glaciers rolled over this limestone escarpment dropping souvenir rocks from as far as the Canadian Shield on the other side of Georgian Bay! I sprayed the rocks with acrylic gloss clear coat to bring out the brilliant colours of the rocks just like when they are wet.
Maple rubs up against the basket. You can see the size of the boulder in comparison.
One of my favourite spots nearby is the Mill Creek at the 6th Sideroad bridge here in the Blue Mountains. As part of the Blue Mountain Watershed Trust Nature Photo of the Week 4-Seasons Challenge, I am taking a photo here each season. The creek flows northwest into the Beaver River.  In the background is a section of the Little Germany Management Area (Grey Sauble Conservation Authority).
Morning sunlight beams across the shallow creek that ripples quietly over rocks. Spring brings the shoreline purple Iris flowers in the foreground and white flowering bushes in the background.
The creek quietly sleeps under the blanket of snow and ice.
My finger tips are aching, but I couldn’t resist doing something with the 18″ pieces of wires left over from electrical work today! My favourite gauge of wire came from heavier-duty twisted wires that once unraveled made the finer base weavers you see. When that ran out I used thicker untwisted strands up the sides. The thickest gauge for the stakes was too thick to braid a border, so I opted for the 3-Behind border instead.
See the finer gauge wire for the base. I love the copper colour!
Dogwood basket as Toulouse emerges from the flowering Dogwood bush.
I harvested fresh Dogwood from the sides of our trails, so they are much younger and therefore greener than the traditional red stalks. Happily though the tips nicely contrasted against the butts in complementary colours of red and green.
The stakes and weavers were cut about 5 days earlier, so they had shrivelled a little which secured the bark. When I made the base stakes from freshly cut pieces, the bark came off easily, so that inspired me to try stripped fresh pieces for the waling.
I did a full round of regular French randing and then for fun reversed the direction of the next set of weavers.
I wanted to try a border that would not need super bending since Dogwood is not as flexible as Willow. I discovered a fantastic instructional YouTube video from the Czech Republic by Kajjka Hátleová. This border was done in 3 stages and worked beautifully for the Dogwood.
Marie demonstrates the scale of the basket: it is one half-cat in diameter.
© 2024 Blue Mountain Baskets
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑