The weekend was my big treat for the year. I spent 2 days at the Ulster Folk Museum on a willow basketry course. In the photos below you will see the base and uprights of my basket and a bit of the weaving. The finished project is a special gift for a special day for a special someone, so I won't post a photo. Rest assured, it looks like a woven willow basket.
Nad, if you are reading, close your eyes for the next sentence. We used traditional tools, among them pig grease for inserting new willow into tight spaces. Okay, Nad, you can open your eyes again. I wasn't keen on the pig grease but found that it wasn't smelly and if I didn't really look at it I might have mistaken the feel of it for shea butter or some other plant product. Yes, Nad, I suppose one could use shea butter or coconut oil but it was hard to come by these greases in Ulster in the early 1900s.
While I was wrecking my thumbs because thumbs do the work in willow weaving, I sat before a window enjoying the beech leaves and thinking about basketmakers who used to weave day in and day out. Some still do but rarely do they make 'a living' doing it. I saw a basket the same style and size as mine a couple days later at a hardware shop on the Lisburn Road. £14.99. Now, I paid around £60 and 10 hours for the pleasure of learning the craft. According to Bob, the fabulous basketmaker who was teaching, he can turn one out in about 4 hours. So, if Bob made that basket he could expect to be paid just less than £3.75 per hour [$5.60] as a MASTER basketmaker. That is, if he grew and harvested the willow himself and sold direct to the person needing a basket. Add in a middle person and he'd probably be making less than £1.50 [£1] an hour.
Anyway, as you can see I came out of the weekend with chapped hands, the smell of wet willow fresh in my memory, and a renewed sense of the importance of valuing the work of craftspeople all over the world. I don't quite know how I am going to manage to weave that willow coffin I've been talking about for a decade or more now--perhaps just make the same kind of basket, just really tall?--but I will definitely be pleased to know that I haven't cheated any master crafter!
While I was wrecking my thumbs because thumbs do the work in willow weaving, I sat before a window enjoying the beech leaves and thinking about basketmakers who used to weave day in and day out. Some still do but rarely do they make 'a living' doing it. I saw a basket the same style and size as mine a couple days later at a hardware shop on the Lisburn Road. £14.99. Now, I paid around £60 and 10 hours for the pleasure of learning the craft. According to Bob, the fabulous basketmaker who was teaching, he can turn one out in about 4 hours. So, if Bob made that basket he could expect to be paid just less than £3.75 per hour [$5.60] as a MASTER basketmaker. That is, if he grew and harvested the willow himself and sold direct to the person needing a basket. Add in a middle person and he'd probably be making less than £1.50 [£1] an hour.
Anyway, as you can see I came out of the weekend with chapped hands, the smell of wet willow fresh in my memory, and a renewed sense of the importance of valuing the work of craftspeople all over the world. I don't quite know how I am going to manage to weave that willow coffin I've been talking about for a decade or more now--perhaps just make the same kind of basket, just really tall?--but I will definitely be pleased to know that I haven't cheated any master crafter!
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