Romancing the Rustic

In part, my love for the craft of basketry is rooted in my affinity for all things rustic. I experience an emotional connection with times gone by.  Can one longingly reminisce for past periods of time  never actually experienced? Well I certainly do and have done most of my life, likely based on perceptions gained from novels and history books, movies and television, or stories told by elders. My dad was born in 1912 and grew up in rural Idaho where he rode his horse to a one-room school, and swam in a “swimmin’ hole.”  I loved hearing about this and though I now know the reality of his childhood was poverty and pain, as a child I wished I’d been there. As do many young girls, I pestered my parents for a horse, and they finally acquiesced. Below left  is a photo of me in 1964 (age 15), having ridden my 18 year-old mare to high school one Saturday. I’ve never lost my love for  horses although I don’t have the opportunity to ride much anymore—here I am in 1994 (age 45) at a dude ranch in Colorado (below right)..

So, I’ve digressed from the topic at hand-- how my love for basketry relates somehow to my attraction to things rustic. For a couple of years I have volunteered to demonstrate basket making with other basket weavers on Ladies’ Day  at San Diego’s Old Town State Park.  Dressed in 19^th century garb we showed the tourists how baskets were (and are) made and used by our ancestors. Other costumed volunteers demonstrated wool spinning and loom weaving, candle  and soap making and other “frontier” crafts practiced by our great-grandmothers and beyond.  I demonstrated constructing a simple ribbed basket that might be used for gathering eggs like the basket below.

This little ribbed basket was made from a kit about 20 years ago of  plain, milled cane. I followed this with what I call my Death Valley Basket. My family (sister and her husband, nephew and his wife) and I spent a Thanksgiving holiday camping in this unusual place. We brought a smoked turkey and all the trimmings and had our Fall feast nestled near ancient water-warn canyons, badlands and sand dunes. I brought some grape vine, a bit of reed and collected date palm inflorescence in Death Valley’s Furnace Creek area oasis and managed to use what I learned from the kit to fashion the rather gnarly version pictured here. Death Valley Basket lives at my sister’s.