dillydallyknitter

Monday, May 11, 2009

"A-tisket A-tasket...

I Learned to Weave a Basket....

On Saturday, LeftCoastKnitter and I went to a basket weaving workshop at Knit One One Studio in Berkeley. (no, it wasn't underwater)

As you can see, we were the first to arrive. Our teacher had to run out and pick up the instructor, who was lost.

Knit One One Studio is filled with light and beautiful hand crafted items and friendly people. The owner, Sile, is a delightful woman and, if you're lucky, she'll have some delicious home made shortbread on hand.

In this workshop, we wove "Celtic hoop and rib" baskets, also known as "Appalachian Egg Baskets" (aka "buttocks" basket because it has a butt shaped bottom). I failed to get a photo of the teacher but her name is Carol Grant Hart and she lives in New England and has family in the Marin area. She was informative and interesting and quickly got us started shaping our "hoops". We all got to put our own stamp of individuality on our baskets by playing with the placement of the intersecting hoops, thus changing the handle length and shape of our baskets.

Next we worked on securing our hoops

The weaving created pockets in which we added more ribs.

The lengths of the ribs give the basket its bottom shape. The blue ribbon we tied on top to help us remember which half was the handle and which half was the bottom!

Time flew by and a few hours later we all had a good start!

Each basket had a slightly different shape.

(photo shamelessly stolen from LCK's blog)

And, after a few more hours of weaving at home, I had my own basket!

Basket weaving is so much fun and, like knitting, has a meditative quality as you weave the reed in and out. It's also a bit hard on the hands and you have to be careful with those long pieces of reed whipping around.