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 19th 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.
Here are a couple of ribbed baskets and other ribbed projects I’ve done. The basic technique is all the same—twining reed, grass or palm inflorescence/palm seed stems over a ribbed structure. How to make it different? Change the ribbed structure or try different materials. I took a great class from Mary Hettmansperger in sculptural twining. Each student's work was very different . My first project (below) hangs in our living room. Take a look at Mary Hett's on-line gallery www.maryhetts.com 
By contrast, the pine needle basket still has the wonderful fragrance of the forest floor where I collected the pine needles. I gave one to my aunt when she was in a nursing home. It reminded us of her cabin in the San Jacinto Mountain town of Idyllwild, CA where she lived for several years and where as I child, my siblings and I spent many happy, school vacations.
Drawing was a favorite pastime when I was a child. Somehow this (left, and below w/ detail) is the only childhood sketch that has survived. As an older kid I did more with crayons, and when it was decided I could not draw, graduated to paint-by-numbers. In my teens and college years I switched to fiber, trying needlepoint, crochet and crewel. My college roommate, fine-artist Lissa Ainley used to say that while she was “artsy,” I was more “craftsy.” What little artistic aspirations I had as a child soon died out for lack of nourishment and only more recently has it begun its rebirth after many false starts dabbling in various crafts in my late 20’s and 30’s including stained glass, stone carving, and painting. I enjoyed the stained glass but it was expensive and messy (shards/splinters of glass all over the apartment), never got accustomed to breathing lead fumes, was constantly cutting myself and I never became very skilled technically, although I did produce a few nice, although rough pieces, and it kept me off the streets, as they say. Below is my first stained glass piece.
<< This coiled pine needle wall hanging is in my sister’s Santa Fe, New Mexico home as are many of my pieces. My sister Ann and I have been making gifts for each other for decades, so we both have pretty good collections of each others' work. A full-time bead artist, Ann has a beautiful website at www.annseverine.com
