The Gift Basket



This is a basket I made in the late 70's. It is based on a Native American gift basket used for weddings and other special occasions where a gift was given. There are three openings around the sides where small gifts could be tucked inside.

Not only does it have a long history of tradition, it has quite a personal history also. I didn't have the rope called for so as is usual with me, I winged it and used some jute I had left from a macrame project. While it resulted in the right proportions of size, it wasn't as stiff as it should have been. It was saggy! The saggy, baggy basket... This is one reason why it has a special personal history.

When I first made it, it had cowrie shells around the top with a fringe of shackle feathers below them and a string of small shells hanging in each opening and was the natural color of the jute. I thought it was pretty cool but I admit it was rather unusual.

It wasn't long after I made it that it had settled down to about a third of the original height... and the openings gaped wide, it looked horrid! The first thing I tried as a remedy was spray starch. It worked fairly well as long as the basket wasn't handled very much but that just didn't happen... I had some pretty ornery friends back in those days, they teased me a lot about my strange "creations"... I found the basket sitting upside down every now and then. It didn't really hurt it except to break the starch. I kept trying stronger cures...I mixed up a strong batch of liquid starch, the kind you have to boil, and soaked the sides of the basket in it for a couple of days... worked for awhile. Finally I used a long, stiff brush and painted the inside with glue.

The only problem with that was that you could see the dried glue on the inside of the neck. As will happen with me, one thing led to another and the picture above is the current version of the gift basket. It's pretty damn stiff now!

I'm sooo bad...

It's been since forever...I didn't have access to the internet for several months and then when I finally did, I kept putting this off. Guilty feelings, you know? Not sure how to pick up the pieces again, just jump in or try to explain. I even thought I should wipe this and start over but was advised against that by a good friend, Joni, at Etsy. Not sure why...there's not much here to be sure. But this is the hardest step, the first one, and now that I've done it I will have no excuses... Oh yeah, the above necklace can be found at my eCrater shop, feathersnsuch, along with other handmade creations and vintage treasures! Hope to see you there!

I Should Have Been a Librarian....

I just realized today that there are books for sale on Etsy. Now this could help solve a big problem I'm having. See, my daughter in Portland, Oregon wants me to move there, something like 1400 miles away! Nothing much left to keep me in Kansas, folks are gone and my son in Kansas City is planning on moving to Washington (the state) in the near future. So I'm all for it EXCEPT that I have so many "treasures" and I just can't afford to move all of them. Books are heavy and if there's a market for them they would be a good thing to weed out.

So most of the afternoon I spent on Biblio.com, checking out the going prices on some books. I have probably close to 300 cookbooks and maybe 100 craft books and this isn't counting paperbacks. I pulled a pretty big stack out of this one bookcase and set it on the floor beside my computer desk and started going through them, putting the ones that I was going to list in one pile and the ones I couldn't part with in another. Well, one pile ended up pretty big and the other not so much. Guess which way it went? Yeah, out of about 30 books I had weeded out 5! Plus I kept getting sidetracked looking through the books, finding recipes I wanted to try and getting pretty hungry in the process.

I wasn't making much progress with the cookbooks so I went and got an armful of craft books from my work room. I picked the ones that were mostly sewing thinking I'd be better at getting rid of them as I'm not that crazy about sewing. Hell, I've glued hems up before and the last time I actually cut out a pattern and made something to wear was a jester costume for Halloween and that was probably 20 years ago!

I did a lot better this time but it was hard, really hard to give up my dreams of the patchwork quilt I've planned to make for the last 30 years, the applique wall hanging that's so outdated that it's back in style again and....on and on....

I know I'll be able to find whatever I want on the internet but it won't be the same to me. There's just something about holding an oversized book on my lap and flipping through the pages, the beautiful photographs catching my eye on the way by, going back and finding the page and then sticking a scrap of paper in the pages of the ones that I'll make "someday". And it doesn't really bother me that there are so many that I'd never have the time to get to all of them if I lived to be 200 years old. It's the same kind of feeling that I get looking through all of the seed catalogs in the middle of winter, if I actually ever bought and planted all that I want in those catalogs I'd have to be living on a farm, a big farm. It's all about possibilities.

I'll go back to "weeding" tomorrow. Maybe it will get easier the more I do it.