Basket tour pt 2

This is the bedlam that basket-making creates.

Baskets to the left:

Baskets to the right:

I grabbed this laundry basket and brought it out to the shop to measure the handles so I can copy them. I made this one in 1988.

The handles are white oak, the basket is ash. Lashing around the rims is hickory bark. That might be the 2nd lashing, it looks newer than the basket, but I forget if I re-did it.

 

It once had a braided foot running around the bottom, When that wore out, I put white oak and hickory bark “skids” on it. These save the wear & tear on the basket’s bottom.

I bought two baskets on ebay, so I could study them in detail. When I’m done I’ll sell them on to the next person, I don’t need to be collecting baskets. This one’s a real beauty, just as simple as can be. White oak throughout. Round bottom, eight uprights, seven of which are split in half to give an odd number of uprights. That way the weaving winds around and around alternating over one/under one as it goes. It’s about 10″ in diameter, and 5″+ up to the rim.

It’s in great shape, nothing missing, no major cracks that I can see yet.

The outside of the bottom:

The handle isn’t notched for the rim. It is woven into the body, and then it pokes out, gets split in half. One half weaves down the bottom, one half turns up & weaves in on itself.

The other is a rib-style basket, usually associated with Appalachia. All white oak as well.

It’s quite small, I forgot to measure it but it fits inside the other one. Just…

I made a few baskets of this form back in the 1980s, but haven’t made one since. I got fixated on New England/New York style baskets, and stuck with those. This is a fine example of that type of basket, very “workmanlike” – not a precious piece of weaving (neither of these two).

 

If anyone wants to buy the old ones, let me know. I paid $94 total for both & shipping. I’ll sell them for $35 each plus shipping. I’ll have some of my own baskets for sale in a week or two. They’ll be way more than that!

Basket tour part 1

 

The past two weeks or so I’ve been pounding ash splints for making baskets. I’ve started weaving a few of them, and have lots more coming up. Baskets used to be almost a weekly thing for me, back in the 1980s and early 1990s, before oak furniture took over my thoughts. But I always come back to them, they’re so much fun to make and even better – to have around.

While getting ready to plunge deeply into them in the next couple of weeks, I’ve been studying some that I have hanging around here. Unlike the baskets I’m starting these days, all these are white oak baskets. You split white oak growth rings apart, instead of pounding like you do ash.

First, some I got when we cleaned up Jennie Alexander’s house after her death. JA loved baskets, and collected lots of them, but especially white oak baskets. I brought home a couple. This one is by a Maryland basketmaker JA knew, James McCrobie.

Here is Mr. McCrobie, as Alexander referred to him, shaving oak at a fair in Maryland.

The bottom of this basket:

And the inside view:

This one’s special because it’s by our great friend Louise Langsner, for Alexander. Way back when Louise used to make white oak baskets. Later, she began growing willow & using that to weave baskets. This white oak basket has hickory bark lashing on the rims.

The bottom:

The inside:

Louise used to peg the handles to the rims. I learned that technique there at County Workshops about 1986 or so. I had read it before that in Drew’s book County Woodcraft. Watch Lost Art Press for an updated version of that classic book (I’ll post about it when it happens too…) – in it is a chapter by Louise about making her oak baskets.

Here’s my first oak basket from that class – the instructor was Darry Wood.

In 1989 I made this round bottom white oak basket for Alexander. It came back to me after her death:

Inside:

Bottom, with hickory bark reinforcements

The hickory handle has a double notch, the lashing is hickory bark.

This one’s mine too, from 1988, I probably made it at Langsner’s – that spring & summer I was the intern there. White oak, hickory handle

I’ve used this basket a lot. Usually it holds all my spoon-carving gear, mostly tools & spoons-in-progress. The bottom features two “skids” shaved hickory bent up into the body. These reduce wear & tear on the bottoms.

One more white oak by me – this one’s from 1990. I’m working (again!) to re-learn how I weave those “filled” bottoms. So I swiped this one back from my wife, emptied it, and will this time keep track of what I did to weave it.

But it’s all ash here now. I haven’t made a white oak basket since this one probably…here’s a real favorite, but very small basket in ash with hickory rims & handle, hickory bark lashing. It’s about 6″ x 8 1/2″ and the basket is 3″ high. I wish I could make them this good all the time. Better go practice…

These new ones still have potential…

here’s the last time I re-learned the filled bottoms. https://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2015/11/01/another-basket-underway/ 

two white oak baskets

Look what fell in my lap – a great white oak basket, from Kim L, via Martha. thanks to both.

It’s a large, heavy-duty basket. All white oak. Some things about it remind me of the Taghkanic baskets from eastern New York. Very thick rims, large stout weavers and uprights. The bottom seems different from what I know about those baskets, but my knowledge is limited to the book Legend of the Bushwhacker Basket by Martha Wetherbee and Nathan Taylor. It’s about a foot high to the rim, and about 17″ in diameter. Here’s some views:

The double-woven bottom is reinforced with added splints that are then slipped into the weaving on the sides of the basket. That might be why this basket is still around. Very tough.

While we were out at Bill Coperthwaite’s place, I noticed a nice white oak basket there too. I got to look at this one with Louise Langsner, who made a slew of white oak baskets over the years, before switching to willow…this one seems to have had a lid that would have fit inside the small rim woven above the actual rim. It’s hard to see, but every upright has been split so the lashing can be very closely spaced.

Here you see the bottom is filled in with extra splints. Makes me think sewing basket, or something like that. When a basket’s bottom is filled in like that, little things don’t get lost out the spaces in between the weaving.

One of our stops on the mini-tour was Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine. We saw some Shaker ash baskets there, and a nice large round white oak one too, but no photography allowed. Drat.