Thursday 17 November 2016

World of Bushcraft Coil Basketry Workshop

The World of Bushcraft (the WOB) is just under an hour away for me and is ideal for me to bet to and do their Wednesday workshops, the biggest problem has been that I've booked as much stuff as I could on my sabbatical that I often found myself unable to attend them as I had something else on. So credit to the WOB as I asked if they were doing coil, willow basketry and net making before Christmas and they laid them on on Wednesdays I could make.

I was to do the session with Joe who is doing a lot of the workshops these days and he said that the coil basketry one is a small amount of instruction and a lot of practice, and it turned out to be the case.



First off, a talk about different styles, uses, materials and stitching patterns.


The demonstration piece is some natural fibre rope and paracord, an Early Learning Centre starter as I called it as it's clear and easy for the beginners to see.

 

So from the stitching at the very start to a stitched and recognisible coil.


A few laughs along the way...

 

And then it was onto starting my natural fibre coil. Joe had harvested some Sedge and Cat Tail and I chose the former with Raffia as the cordage. And once I was up and running the rest of the session really was just working away at the basket and chatting, oh and getting a cut off the Sedge!


It is rather therapeutic making a coil basket and this close up shows that it is rather time consuming which as it's a simple basket design I'd have expected it to be a bit quicker. You live and learn.



As you can see I've made inroads and tilted the work to show the sides slowly forming, but I have a little more work left to finish it off. I've come home with some extra Sedge and made sure that I know how to finish it off which in keeping with the simplistic design is easy. Ding ding round two at the WOB centre next week for a bit more basketry, but with Willow.

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