Today I began work on a Victorian style English Shopping Basket. The first photograph shows the rounds of cane ready to be untied and then woven along with the cane I dyed earlier. The Book in the photograph is a basket-making book by Lyn Siler, one of a half-dozen or so I use.
In the second photograh, I have begun to weave the base, weaving natural and dyed cane together. The tile and green marble slab provide the weight to keep the horizontal weavers steady while I interweave the vertical strands. The tile and the marble will become inserts sometime in the future for trivets.
The third photograph show the base after it had been trued to size. The tape measure is a handy tool in this process. The ruler forms a straight edge against which I score the cane at the edges of the base. The pizza cutter is the scoring tool, with scoring done on both the top and bottom of the base.
Photograph #4 shows the basket with several rows of the vertical weavers in place. The open book shows the model I am embellishing. Again, you will note the high-tech handy-half-house brick used as a weight in the weaving process!
Photograph #5 show three rows of "curls" to give some of that Victorian feel to the basket. (Yesterday I visited an etsy forum where people promote their items. One promotion was for items as gifts for men. I do not think this basket with its pink or wine coloured curls would fit in that promotion.)
This basket to this stage took about four hours of work, interrupted by shopping, lunch, and an English Premier League soccer game between Liverpool and Arsenel (4 -4.)
Tomorrow I will continue working on this beautiful basket. Later in the week, I will begin working on two or three models of a hanging tray as propotypes for a custom order request I received today.
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