These are eleven of my baskets. I didn’t realize how many I have, and how many of them I use almost every day. Until I needed a basket to put cookies in. I started poking around until I found the right one, a small picnic basket with two handles.
There’s my blue fiber project basket, three egg baskets, two harvest baskets, and three storage baskets. Those are just the ones in this picture. It amuses me to see so many, and I really do use them all the time.
My blue fiber basket has 3 spindles and a couple of spinning wheel bobbins in it, as well as some spun yarn and fiber. it’s my ‘grab and go’ for any time I’m going to join friends at a spin-in. Under the shallow harvest basket on the right is my folded laundry basket. Yet, the clothes get folded in front of the TV and put into that little blue basket before they go into drawers.
Women have been making and using baskets for at least 12 millennia. That’s 12,000 years we know of, since most baskets are made of wood and fibers, there’s not much left after a few thousand years to go by. I’ll bet the craft is much older than that. Gatherers need baskets like hunters need sharp points.
I’ve made baskets from plastic shopping bags, t-shirts cut into strips and strips of brown paper. Not the kind of materials that last forever, but common recyclable materials. I stopped making the plastic ones because there’s a nasty powder that gets on my hands and up my nose. I don’t like snorting plastic dust. It makes me feel sick.
T-shirts, on the other hand, appear to be much friendlier to the body. There are dozens of t-shirts around the house that need to be recycled into something. I cut them into 1 inch strips, with a bit of thought I can make one continuous strip of t-shirt material out of the tube part of the shirt.
It’s time for me to go, gotta deliver those cookies.
Jordan's Croft 