Weaving with Scoby
One of the best things about teaching is meeting a wide variety of people who have a wide variety of reasons for wanting to learn basketry skills. One of my students, Lucy, has attended three courses so far, and is working towards a doctorate at the Slade School of Fine Art at UCL. Her focus […]
Making lime bast cordage
It was pretty windy in London earlier this week, resulting in quite a few branches ending up on roads and pavements. We have a lot of lime trees around us, and on walking past some fallen branches I noticed that on some of them the outer bark had split and separated, with layers of inner […]
Bubblewrap basket
A couple of weeks ago we started back at City Lit on the second year of the Creative Basketry course. It was great to be back in the classroom with my fellow students again. We spent the first two sessions developing visual designs and processing materials. In the first week we played with newspaper, seeing […]
Bread baskets, and much else, at MERL
Last Saturday I spent a very pleasant afternoon at the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) in Reading. The occasion was a commons feast, to launch the project The Commons: Re-enchanting the World. The commons is a social system that cares for and preserves resources that we all share: land, air, and water. This project […]
Making a camel muzzle (sort of) with daffodil stalks
Every year I normally collect daffodil leaves as they start dying down and turning brown. After drying them, I spray them lightly with water to soften them and use them to make cordage (string). This year, however, as well as collecting a few leaves, I focused on collecting the flower stalks after the flowers had […]
