Basketry Workshop!

Saturday November 13th's basket weaving workshop at the Chicago Weaving School was absolutely fabulous! It may be my favorite workshop/art endeavor as of yet! The owner of the school, Natalie Boyett, is such an amazing woman with an immense drive to bring the art of weaving into every Chicago-ite's life. She is also a huge advocate for the ACM program (which is great) because she had an ACM intern at her site last spring and Natalie said it was a really wonderful time.

We started out learning all about the different kinds of reeds involved in making a bread basket. The materials are predominately wicker or rattan and the reeds come in flat or round styles. Luckily, Natalie started our baskets for us already so we just had to continue on what she did. Although, we were taught how to start our own baskets too for further reference. Here is what a barely started bread basket looks like:

The wrapping of the round reed is called twining and it is basically an under/over weaving exercise...quite simple once I got it. It's really entrancing. Once I got my base done, we learned how to bend the spokes, the flat reeds in the wagon wheel pattern, up to start the walls of our basket. That looks like this:

I had to keep wetting the basket and the twining reed so it did not get dry and crack. Though, of course, there were many cracked reeds. Thank goodness Natalie taught us how to fix those and weave in new round reeds. The flat reed in the above photo was added as a design element and that was woven in just like the twining reeds. After about three hours, we had a finished basket!