Atoning for a long-ago joke

Long before I joined the SCA, I was involved with a fellow with a bachelor's degree in physics. I don't want to get into details of that miserable portion of my life, but I will reveal that he would call humanities and social-science classes "basket weaving." It was his shorthand way of putting down those subjects, and I doubt he was the first to do so.

Fast forward to the first week of August ... I went mundane camping with my SCA household, and I made a basket! And it took a fair amount of effort. I wouldn't compare it with other difficult things I've done, like taking graduate-level astrophysics exams ... but still, I had to pay attention to the details of what I was doing.

At first I'd thought I'd missed the basket weaving. One household member, known in the SCA as Faolán, taught the class on Sunday, August 1. However, I'd had other plans for that day and had to do some freelance work during the week, so I couldn't arrive until the morning of Thursday the 5th.

Nevertheless, my friend Johanna had bought a huge amount of basket-weaving supplies in preparation for camping week, and so on she asked, "Who wants to make a basket?" Even though I'd brought other crafty things to do, of course I replied, "I do!"

Now, these basket-making supplies were not in the best shape anymore. After Sunday's class, somebody (unknown, but not Johanna) put Johanna's wet wood and reeds into plastic bags. Trying to be helpful, I'm sure. But the plastic-bagging allowed dark mold spots to start growing on the strips of wood. Oops! Still, we decided to press ahead and weave baskets.

The first step, of course, was to re-soak the basket materials in water to make them pliable. We had to repeat this step many times as we went along, because even on a humid day the wicker starts drying out after half an hour or so. The actual weaving began with a 7 x 7 grid woven to form the bottoms of our baskets. Even though the baskets were starting out square, they would end up being round on top. (Go to your local thrift store to see how many baskets are like that.)

Some images of the progress:

I was amazed at the amount of work that it took to make the basket. Not exhausting work, not filthy dirty work, not intellectually daunting work -- just a lot of attention to the details of what I was doing. Johanna emphasized that we had to keep pushing down the woven strips as we went around and around, and that took some hand strength. At times I had to pause to deal with muscle cramps in my hands -- that doesn't often happen to me. Yet Johanna's advice turned out to be correct and greatly improved the look of my basket.

When I began the basket, I thought it would take just the one afternoon of the middle day (I camped for three days and two nights). But dinnertime came, and we were still nowhere near done. The next morning, I wanted to prioritize packing up my stuff so that my canvas tent could be dry when I dropped it -- I didn't trust the cloudy skies. And, lo and behold, I missed the rain and mostly the rain missed us too. But it still took from just after lunch to just after dinner to finish up everything. And finally we had our baskets!!

In this image, my basket is on the left, Tirzah's is on the right, and Johanna's is in the middle.

The next day, once I was home, I left the basket to dry in the sun. Then I soaked it in a 1:10 solution of bleach and water. That killed the mold spores and lightened the mold stains, which are still there, but much less noticeable. I may apply some sort of finish to my basket, but I haven't decided yet.

So, there you have it, my first basket! In case you are interested, I found a short history of medieval and Renaissance baskets on YouTube.

A few years ago, my friend Teleri gave me a copy of the book Plaited Basketry with Birch Bark by Vladimir Yarish, Flo Hoppe, and Jim Widess (Sterling Publishing, 2009). Apparently, basket weaving with birch bark is very much a Russian thing. I don't really have a source of birch bark, since such trees are less common in Maryland than they are in my native New England, and buying the stuff online would get expensive. Perhaps I could start experimenting with heavy paper or something like that.

At any rate, I have added one more type of craft to the List of A&S Things I Have Tried Since 2004. And never again will I make one of those physics-student "basket weaving" jokes.