Thanksgiving Day Basket

For some reason I seem to spend some part of every Thanksgiving break making a basket. The girls are always with their dad and it is so quiet that I feel the need to keep busy so I don't go nuts from the quiet.

This year I decided to do something a little different. For starters I actually made the base for this basket out of some scrap cedar left over from building my house. Since I haven't posted anything else about that building project I'll jump ahead and say that the staircase to the loft and the wall around it are finished in red cedar. I love the smell and the rustic look. But back to the basket. I finally found a router bit that will cut a 1/16" slot in a piece of wood which is exactly what is needed for a basket base. It's called, amazingly enough, a 'slot cutter.'

I started with a small scrap, about 2 1/2 by 4 inches to make a business card basket. An odd number of 1/4" flat oval stakes are woven in a continuous over two, under two pattern giving it a diagonal look. A 3/8" flat oval rim finished it off lashed with fine cane.

Now for the critique.

• The corners of the base should have been rounded. That would have allowed for a stake in each corner and made the weaving more even.


• The dark brown stakes really don't match the reddish purple of the base. So experiment with other stake colors.


• It is way too large because I'm not used to making a basket that small. In fact this is the smallest basket I've ever made. You could stack two lifetimes of business cards and still not fill it.

Any other critiques?

I usually give away most of the baskets I make, and then I never even remember what they look like. As I was reading some knitting blogs where knitters use their blogs to journal their knitting projects I thought that might be a great place to keep up with the baskets I make. I looked for basketry blogs, but couldn't find any.