I remember wanting to learn to make baskets from the plants I found when I was a child, but no one around me knew how and could teach me.  

Fast forward a half a century, and at the age of 54, I still have that yearning to learn how to work creatively with the natural abundance that’s all around me. And finally I’ve started to give myself permission to go there. Last couple months my focus was working with recycled paper and big bluestem grasses; but lately that early interest in basketry re-emerged.

For my birthday my husband Michael gifted me with an online class that teaches three different types of basket weaving. My inner child is over the moon! And I can’t go anywhere without seeing potential basket-making materials — corn in the fields, cattails in the ditches, weeds in my garden, bark on a tree that fell in our back yard.  Yesterday I was experimenting with making cordage with nettles, and today I harvested the bark on raspberry canes.  What is possible? I’m hungry to find out.  And my hands want to work with plant fibers in every otherwise idle moment.

As I work, I gain appreciation for what must represent countless generations of basketry traditions and technology passed from parents to children, from skilled master to students, in all cultures. As I enjoy learning a basket weaving technique called “twining”, I feel inspired to poke around and find out who invented it. According to various sources, it seems that we have found remains of twined baskets from Egypt AND the Americas that are 10,000 years old. Whaaaat??? My mind spins at the implications. What significance baskets must have had for humans for so much of our history! It makes sense that I’m drawn to learn; it must be in my bones. And it makes sense that my neurodivergent fidgetiness might have a useful purpose, historically speaking.

Below: photos of my journey from the first experiments, to deciding to re-organize a shed to make room for my basketry project, to the point where I’m starting to get a little more skillful.