Dordogne, Berkshire, Catalonia (Part 3 Catalonia)

From Reading to Catalonia to arrive in the last hour of the annual basket fair in Salt on the outskirts of Girona, so I made a quick dash around to try and see as much as possible before it closed. The Fair is organised by the Catalan Basketmakers Association who had invited me to run a post fair course for some of their members. On the Monday a group of us headed out of Girona to Toroella de Montgri to visit Josep and Magdas  workshop/shop. Set in a narrow street it had a cave like feel, filled with basketry, materials and chairs for restoration and where in a dark corner a female ‘gigante’ watches over everything.

On to the house that the association had rented for the course set on a ‘slow’ farm in the countryside, then off to the beach at the mouth of the river Ter to gather both beach flotsam and maritime rush Juncus acutus. Never having had a chance to handle this version of rush before I now understand why it is used to make fish traps and baskets like the saranda - it is very tough. Josep taught us how to pull it from the plant in two movements but some plants surrendered their rushes much more easily than others!

There were 13 students, Italian, French, Venezuelan and Spanish, most of whom are professional makers who had just had a hard weekend of selling at the fair so I offered them an opportunity to ‘play’ and to experiment rather than to impose specific techniques on them. But I did ask them only to use materials that were free. In fact some purchased materials were brought to the workshop and used towards the end and the machine split chestnut bands were perfect for certain techniques. It would be great if someone in UK could make those, or ash or hazel ones for us. Anyone know a wood/coppice/forestry business that might take it on, or at least give it a go? I am sure there would be a market for them.

Instead of completed items I brought lots of my technical samples for them to examine, they could choose any techniques they would like to learn and I asked them to make something that could be carried on the body without using the hands to hold whatever they made. We only had two days to work in and at the end of the second day the makers performed a catwalk wearing their creations. Antonios  plaited palmito nose cone for stabbing flies whilst working was just one of many gems!

As always it was a real pleasure to be in the company of fellow makers and my thanks to Josep and the Catalan Basketmakers for inviting me to share some time with them, to Idoia and Severine for translations from French to Spanish, to Mari for taking photos and setting up a Whats app group, to Carles, Francoise, Julio and many others for cooking skills, Magda for the lift to the station and to all of them for ‘playing’ and experimenting.

Boat Baskets and Beaters

On a damp March Saturday this year, a few folk gathered at Mid Yell Church Hall to participate in an auction of the church's possessions. The late Georgian church, simple and solid, that had wedded, christened, buried and, no doubt, hectored the community for nearly 200 hundred years is now too expensive to  maintain for the small congregation that use it, so it is being sold for conversion to other purposes. In the announcement for the sale it mentioned a basket and a couple of carpet beaters and my curiosity was piqued.

In amongst the cups and saucers, kettles,Christmas decorations, a manger with fluffy lamb, pews, vases, two organs and the altar was a Southport boat basket and two cane carpet beaters, all in good condition although the basket has lost its lid. No one else was interested in owning them so my £2 bid secured the lot which included (rather surprisingly in a church) a small folding card table and a reel of very fine copper wire. Some of the participants in the auction ended up buying tons of stuff in order to support the church and when I asked one man what he would do with it all, he said he had no idea. The most poignant moment of the whole event was when the Bible, a massive, ancient, leather bound, silver clasped copy appeared and nobody wanted to buy it, not even for one pound. Everyone  hung their heads and the sense of  shame in the room was tangible.

The Southport boat basket was an extremely popular possession in its day. Many examples can be seen in museums in Britain and particularly in Scotland, the Shetland Museum has at least two. According to Dorothy Wright (p.120 Complete Book of Baskets and Basketry, ISBN 0 88914 055 3) it was designed in about 1830  by a Mr. Cobham of Mawdesley in Lancashire and produced by the local basket making firm of Thomas Cowley. Although no one else at the auction bid for the basket plenty of people admired it and older folk remembered having one similar at home. They were used for taking goods such as eggs and butter  to market  but I have  heard they also   served  as 'cabin baggage' for the many women gutters who travelled by train around the northern British coasts following the herring boats, though I have no hard evidence for this.

It isn't surprising it was such a popular basket because it was very well designed, not only in terms of its functionality but also in terms of the time and skill  needed to produce it. Made out of buff willow and split ash it must have been  a quick basket to produce because of its method of construction.
Only one simple wooden mould would  have been needed to make the willow frame of the basket, the willow frame of the lid and the ash  handle bow/central rib as they are all the same size. The lid was woven from each end on one frame with a gap between the two woven areas that went over the handle. It was attached to one of the long sides of the frame. This would have been far quicker than making two separate lids  as it was only necessary to make and attach one frame. One of the Southports in the Shetland Museum collection has a plywood lid which was obviously a replacement, but very effective and quick to do. Interestingly a fettle ( carrying band) had also been added to this basket so that it could be carried on the back  as though it were a kishie.

Southport boat basket in Shetland Museum with wooden lid and fettle

The use of  a strip of ash that was both the handle bow and central  rib would also have been much simpler to construct than a willow one, requiring only the bending and tacking of the ash strip. The strength supplied by this ash bow/rib meant that the ribs on the basket could be spaced quite widely apart thus speeding up the weaving, there are only 10 willow ribs on the full size basket. Perhaps the most ingenious design feature is the strip of ash that runs end to end underneath the basket because not only did it make the basket very strong but it also eliminated the need to fill in the gap between the  two sides  with willow, which is always the slowest and most difficult part of making a frame basket.

Given how popular this basket was I am surprised no-one has thought to make them again now. The design is well documented, it is an indigenous British basket and it is extremely practical. As  I have willow and the ash trees grow like weeds around my studio  I am sorely tempted to give it a go.

Before electricity came into our homes carpet beaters were essential household equipment. On a dry spring day carpets and mats were draped over the washing line and  the living daylights were beaten out of them by bored housewives wielding these decorative cane beaters. Not only was this superb therapy for the woman doing the beating but it  also got rid of all the the dust and moth larvae without her needing to spend any money on electricity. In our house the man beats the mats with a length of timber or an old tennis racket but I might feel a tad more inclined to join in with these lovely beaters. There are also instructions for making a carpet beater  (p.101) in the Dorothy Wright book mentioned previously.

Plaited Garlands

These pretty, plaited palm garlands are possibly made in many places around the world, but I learnt about them in Tamil Nadu in Southern India.  They were being made by a rural self-help womens co-operative and exported to charity and fair trade shops in Europe and America for sale as Christmas decorations.

They are an excellent product for a co-op like this, where the women are not trained weavers but they can learn very quickly how to make them. It is also portable work that allows the women to carry it with them and continue whilst walking to and from their homes or waiting for buses. They get paid by the piece so being able to work whenever they have a chance is an important factor for them. As an export product it also works well because they pack into a neat, solid tube that takes up little space.

Made from locally harvested coconut palm leaf and natural dyes they are, almost, a perfectly sustainable product, the only compromise being the lack of a local market which requires them  to be transported  long distances.

I was invited to the co-op partly to help them develop some new designs, so  the women taught me how to prepare and split the palm leaf and weave these decorations. When I returned to London I developed quite a few variations on the theme that would still pack up small and were not too complicated to produce, which I gave to them. I also added a few other more complicated items such as three–dimensional stars, but I never had any feedback and my life moved on,  so I don’t know if they ever used any of my designs or not. I hope they did and that they sold well for them.

Variations on the theme

It is a bit late for Christmas decorations this year, but these garlands will work just as well for other festive occasions and,  maybe, in an idle moment over the festive season you might like to make some guilt free decorations for next year out of the mountains of packaging that will inevitably accumulate. So here are the instructions for making a similar garland. As palm leaf is not readily available everywhere I am showing you how to make this basic simple woven spiral decoration using tetra pak, which is available pretty much everywhere.  It can also be worked with coloured papers and plastics, bark and leather among other many other things.

Once you have got the technique it can be varied in many ways simply by increasing or decreasing the width of the strips or increasing/decreasing the number of weavers. If you get the bug you can try double linked chains, mixing materials, threading other materials through the loops… you get the idea.

For this one you will need tetra pak strips 1cm wide and as long as possible. Here are a couple of videos to help you make them. This one shows how to cut the cartons and this one shows you how to make a simple wire gauge to help cut them evenly.

Then you just need to watch this video which shows you how to weave them.

At the beginning to hold everything together I use a staple, but just one end of the staple goes through the strips so that the strips can  be easily separated out. Once you get started you just keep going for as long as you like, it is really only one movement repeated ad infinitum. If you need to join strips you can overlap the two ends and work with the two together for a bit, but its probably easier for a novice to just staple them together.

Looped and Found

Collaborations between potters and basket makers seem to be quite popular at the moment. Last year I participated in  Duos Potiers Vanniers and this year Nathalie Du Bernard of Poterie des Chals invited me to partner her  in Osier la Terre an open submission exhibition which is now on at the Ecomusee de Bresse until the 30 Septemeber.

Because I was in Shetland at the time when we needed to be working on the project it wasn’t  really feasible. But, when I went to Roussillon to teach in March, Nathalie showed me a large terracotta head, that she had made, and asked me if I would like to work on it. She was hoping that we might be able to squeeze our joint effort into the exhibition at the last moment, but the opening was very close and we had to get the very heavy head from Isere in east France to west France for me to work on. Nathalie had relatives returning from their easter break in the Alps who were cajoled into squeezing it into the boot of their car and I made a trip to Poitiers to fetch it from them. Despite our best efforts the opening of the exhibition came and went but once I finished the work it went back to Isere, this time with the assistance of a potter, Patrick Rollet, who was attending a pottery market in the Dordogne.

Nathalie assured me he would be amenable to this idea but when I arrived at his stand at the fair with the one metre high scaffolded head he seemed less keen, but graciously allowed me to leave it with him! I have heard nothing since….. Whether it will ever been seen publicly is still all a mystery to me.

When I first saw Nathalies piece, in the very special and ancient pottery that she works in, the idea for my contribution came almost immediately. I wanted to do  something that was about thoughts and memories of ancient pots.  I wanted to use a mix of materials  to create something that was extremely light in appearance as a contrast to the physical weight of the terracotta. Looping offered the lightness and could also suggest pathways of neurones and I still had a sack full of used green wire, given to me by the electrician next door, to loop with.

Whilst gardening  I often dig up little pieces of old earthenware. Over time I have collected these fragments on my windowsills and now this project seemed to present the perfect opportunity to make use of them. I enclosed each piece in a looped structure of fine copper wire and subsequently they were incorporated into the vase-shaped form that grew out of the head.

I have previously discussed the phenomena that I have called ‘the law of material sufficiency’  it happened again and when I had finished this piece the sack of green wire was empty, I had needed no more, or no less.

El Costurero de Aracne

Last August I was invited to participate in a project organised by Angel Sanz Montero of the Department of Art Textiles at the University of Granada. The brief was to make 40 'identical' works that would become part of the 6^th edition of El Costurero de Aracne which translates as Arachne's Sewing Box. 

Arachne was, according to Ovid a superb, but mortal, weaver in Greco Roman mythology who picked an argument with the goddess Athena. Being, among other things, the goddess of weaving, Athena wasn’t too impressed when Arachne boasted that she was a much better weaver than the goddess. A mega spat ensued and Athena used her superpowers to morph Arachne into a spider! The tale, it is suggested, explains why spiders aren’t bad at weaving either. 

The brief didn't mention any of this, it just said the works should be of a textile character that measured no more than 3x3x2,5cms!!!  Que horror!  Anyone who is familiar with my work knows that  I do not normally do small, let alone miniature. I like to make sculptural objects that occupy some space. Also, as a consequence of handling a lot of wire, my finger tips have become quite desensitised which makes working on a miniature scale difficult. However, even with only the promise of receiving a copy of the final work as recompense I decided to take on the challenge and today my copy of El Costurero de Aracne VI arrived in the post.

I was determined that I would make a basket and that it should use recycled materials and not be too labour intensive as I had to make 40 of them. In the end, after considerable experimentation, I decided to make small frame baskets. I used plastic bottle tops to give me a standard size for a circular frame that would not exceed the limitations. I then cut rings off the plastic lids and looped telephone wire onto these rings making small hemispherical baskets. Once I had the formula it didn’t take too long and I just made a few a day in between other jobs. The colours are different but technically the baskets are identical.

At the time of designing the baskets and whilst I was making them, I had not looked up the myth of Arachne so I hadn’t consciously considered making any references to the myth. I was too busy worrying about what I could possibly do on such a tiny scale! So, it was a pleasant surprise  when I had finished them and laid them out to photograph to see that I had made 40 little spiders webs. This phenomena is happening so frequently to me now when I am making that I am beginning to lose all sense of what is a conscious thought and what is not.....

In total 15 artists took part and each little box has 15 compartments containing a miniature art work. There is also a DVD with details about the works and the participating artists. It was produced in an edition of 50 examples so the other 35 boxes will go to other places and people. Tomorrow at 11.00  El Costurero de Aracne VI is being publicly presented at the University of Granada.

Woven Tetra Stars

Not every tetra pak has a silver lining, but those for milk do and are useful for Christmas decorations.

These tetra stars cost nothing to make, require no toxic glitter sprays or glues and the only child labour involved will, hopefully, be that of your own children! Northern Europe, America, Scandinavia and Japan are the most commonly claimed locations for the origin of these decorations. It doesn’t really matter where they originated, but in the making of them there is weaving as you might find on baskets all over the world. There is also a whiff  of origami and surface decoration curls that often feature on south East Asian and Native American baskets.

You will need 4 strips of tetra pak 2cm wide and 55cm long. To get strips long enough from a one litre  carton you will have to cut off the top and bottom of the carton, open it out into a cylinder and cut spirally. Start with a taper and gradually widen it  until it measures 2cm. 

You can do this free hand but here are a couple of films that might help.  The first one shows you how to make a simple tool for cutting strips to an even width and the second how to use the tool to cut strips for weaving. 

Weave the four strips together, silver side up, making sure the weaving is in the centre of the strips so that all the free ends are the same length. 

Now do a “scooby doo” folding the four strips that are underneath forwards, in turn, over themselves and thread the last end under the first. The pictures show the 1st, 2nd and in the last one the 3rd and 4th moves together.

The printed side of the carton is now showing and all the strips are in pairs. 

 Turn the weaving over and repeat the action with the 4 strips that are on the top of each pair. 

 You now have all the strips spread out again.

With the silver side up, look at the edges of the woven square and you will see that half of the strips are behind just one layer of carton and half are behind a folded edge. Using the ones behind the single layer (they may be on the right or on the left of each pair depending on how you wove the initial square) fold the strip out to the side at an angle of 45degrees.

Then take the same strip around the back then forward to the front over the angled part and thread it down under the single layer of carton. 

Do the same with the other three ends that are underneath the single layer of card. You may need to cut points on the end of the strips to help with the threading. 

 Turn over and repeat the action on the other side, again using the strips that are under the single layer. 

 You will now have eight strips spread out.

On the silver side take one of the free ends that are on  top and lift it up into a loop. Now thread it from the centre of the weaving towards the outside and under the strip that it was previously lying on top of.  Pull the end gently down until it really doesn’t want to go any more and pinch the two edges together at the centre and coax the other part into a cone shape. 

Do the same with the other 3 strips that are on top of the weaving

Turn it over and do the same thing on the other side. Trim off the ends. If you want to hang the star, tie a loop of string with a single knot and push the loop up through the centre. You can gently pull the knot inside to hide it.

The variations are endless, not just with the size of strip but also the way in which it is started, the direction of the points and colour combinations.  For the raised parts it is possible to make cones that don’t touch each other, which makes it more spiky looking.  You can also make another set of points in between  these…. but I will let you play....

There is a whole milky way of possibilities for you to discover.

More Woven Home

Back in July I wrote about some of the things I had been making for my own home and mentioned I was working on a log basket - it is now finished.

The log basket that we were using  I made in traditional fashion, some years ago, with home grown willow. It didn’t however start life as a log basket, as it was made for taking washing out to the line. Since then a narrower door is used to take the washing outside. This basket was too wide to get through the door without tipping  it sideways and sometimes the clean washing fell out ... not a good way to start the day!

It was then  requisitioned  as a log basket but because it was originally meant for washing I hadn't rapped the weaving tightly and  little bits of wood and bark sifted themselves through the gaps and onto the floor. Consequently every time  the basket was moved it uncovered a pile of sawdust on the floor.  To deal with this I had made a highly engineered cardboard insert for the basket!

Perhaps you are getting the message from this, and from previous  posts, that, for me, good design is about making the daily tasks in life easier and more enjoyable and not about making  more housework.

So the new log basket had to deal with the sawdust problem, but I also wanted it to look more interesting and colourful than the brown willow one. I will have to look at it every day and brown makes me feel serious, it doesn’t really cheer me up.  If I am lighting the stove it is because I am cold and I need cheering up. The shape needed to be similar to the willow one, low and wide in order to relate to the shelves above it, but also to make it easy to see the choice of logs inside. It also needed to be fairly sturdy, though not too  hefty, as all it does is contain the logs.

In my stock of collected materials I found a pile of pressed card beer carriers. They came around bottles of German beer and are strong enough to hold and carry 3 litres of beer in glass bottles. I haven’t used them for anything before, which presented me with an interesting challenge, and the bright yellow design seemed ideal for the kitchen. But the carriers when opened up were not very big, so for plaiting they would have to be joined. I experimented with different ways of joining the strips and in the end decided that stapling would be efficient and quick. It seemed more honest to use staples than glue. The strips were cut quickly with a paper cutter,  stapled into long lengths and then plaited into a square based basket. Various decisions had to be made about how to staple the strips together, in terms of the design on the card, and then about what order to weave them in. I also considered which way to staple the strips so that the overlap could be pulled through the weaving. I only tell you this because you would not know about these things just by looking at the finished piece! A layer of black strapping tape was then woven in on top of the strips adding protection for the card and making the pattern more defined.

Some time ago I developed a way of using bunched willow for borders on plaited baskets. I decided to employ this technique again because it works really well and you don't have to soak the willow (always a bonus in my book). The woven card  basket, when it is only cut and stitched at the top edge, is still quite floppy but once the willow is attached it becomes tensioned and strong.  It seems as though you will never get the two ends to meet in anything other than a pointed leaf shape, but when they finally do, it forms  into a perfect ring and the basket becomes very solid. The process is a bit magical and I always enjoy doing it.

That left the handles and feet to resolve. The handles were made with  two pieces of electric cable with  the outer casing stripped off the ends of the wires.  These were then threaded  through the border to attach them. I decided that feet were necessary to protect the base of the basket from the tiled floor and  used black plastic lids from coffee jars that had been given to me. I riveted these on to the base, one in each corner and one in the middle. I could have stitched them on but that will be the back up if, for any reason, the rivets fail.

When I put the basket in place and took a photo I was quite shocked to realise that my choice of technique and colour scheme had not been my decision at all. It had, in fact, been decided for me by the Scottie dog and the Mexican tiger that have stood  on the shelves above the log basket for several years!