MOROCCO - January 2019 - just back from an amazing holiday in Taroudant, where we visited basketmakers and learned a little of the skills they use in transforming local materials into baskets of all kinds. I will post more on a separate page.
New home in Spain - arriving with man, van, car, trailer, cat and dog - no electricity or water in our new dwelling but plenty olive trees.
My new project is to set up a website to record traditional baskets - starting with the ones I have been so fascinated by in Scotland and Northumberland. I hope to have contributions from other enthusiasts from around the world. We must be the generation to record this ancient and precious craft before it is lost.
At last my dream of visiting the major basket making fair at Vallabregues in the south of France came true. Travelling in our campervan we stayed at the camp site next door and I was able to visit the fair for the whole weekend. I walked round the charming village with baskets on display in every nook and cranny, watched the procession of local people with more baskets and finally visited the fair itself, taking photos and talking to makers. I am posting photos on several more pages on my site in the hope that you can share my enjoyment of this great event
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THE FISHING BASKETS OF NORTHUMBRIA

Finally the book (well, booklet) of the Northumbria Basketry Group research into their fishing baskets. Credited to me but of course with a huge amount of support from the group including the photographers and Alan Winlow and Sheila Walton and the publisher, Wanney Books. Off to the Durham Dales Centre to do some making and talking and demonstrating this weekend and selling the book too.
2016 has been a busy year working on the Woven Communities project with St Andrews University and the Scottish Basketmakers' Circle. This has seen us looking at some wonderful collections of baskets at the Museum of Rural Life, Anstruther Fisheries Museum and many more and trying our hand at straw rope and netting as well as basket making. Messy fun.
Please go to our Scotland's Woven Communities Facebook page or the Woven Communities website for more information and lots of photos.
Please go to our Scotland's Woven Communities Facebook page or the Woven Communities website for more information and lots of photos.
This article was reproduced in the latest (Christmas 2015) edition of the Scottish Basketmaker's Circle Newsletter.
My journey into basket making. Liz Balfour.
The journey begins in 1951.
As a little girl you must stay away from the big electric saws when Dad is using them but you are allowed to help pick out the slips of wood he uses to make baskets with when the sawing is over. For a few years this is his winter occupation when the market garden is quiet. He makes a variety of trugs assembled with oak spale and bent wood frames.
You make baskets yourself at school under the instruction of Sister Phyllis Ella, a tray and a knitting basket. You are proud of these and they last a long, long time. They are woven with cane on a wooden base.
You grow up and forget all about basket making until you are in your late twenties and working overseas. Someone opens up a cupboard full of elderly centre cane and dusty wooden bases and says ‘You like crafts Liz’ and the next part of your journey begins.
With luck you remember a few things from school and with even more luck you come across a copy of ‘Canework’ by Charles Crampton. Soon you are sharing your few shreds of knowledge with a group of youngsters in English (‘In front, behind’) and Afrikaans (‘Fur een, echter een’). The baskets turn out well, the youngsters are pleased and the parents delighted. You start to look, really look, at baskets.
In Africa they come in all shapes and sizes in subtle grasses and leaves, coiled and twined. Each one tells the story of its origin, its maker, the materials it is made from, how it is made.
Back in Scotland it’s an itch you have to scratch: you take your first lesson in willow basketry from Bernard Graves in Aberdeen, leaving your dog and small daughter en route with relatives who meet you at a station on the journey north.
You come home and practise with willow, dogwood and snowberry from the old railway line walks in Edinburgh. Gaining momentum you apply for a bursary to study more and travel to London by the overnight coach, (daughter with Grandmother, dog in kennels) then out again with a lift from a kind BA member, learn as much as you can all weekend, then back by the overnight coach.
You start a group to meet with like-minded people (OK, one like-minded person). This is Tom Simpson, retired farmer, who has been learning from Meg Tapley and is engaged in making llama creels. You become firm friends, start a self-help group in Skirling near his Borders home. You go down in your Morris 1000 Traveller, he takes his scooter.
You begin a modest club which you think you will call ‘The Scottish Basketmakers’ Circle’. You poach members shamelessly from the BA and take up the offer of teachers from England to travel north and run workshops. Mary Butcher is held up on a dodgy East Coast train and is hours late but teaches as cheerfully as ever all weekend. Norah Kennedy teaches you short cuts and not to panic if something snaps.
There are more self-help groups, you meet Graham, Lise, Lizzy, Jane, Trevor and many more, you all discover Colin Manthorpe. You battle with technique and give up basket making for good at least once a year.
Then you turn around and somehow several decades have passed, you have a giant soaking tub in the back garden, your own workshop crammed with tools and materials, a vast knowledge of obscure facts and techniques, a back catalogue of friends, people you have met, kindnesses done, places you have travelled to, baskets you have learned how to make and patient teachers who have taught you their skills.
You have been all over Scotland including far flung Orkney and Lewis, south into Cumbria, Northumberland, the West Midlands, East Anglia, Yorkshire, Somerset, Sussex and Wales. You have been overseas to Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, France, Spain, Morocco, Zambia, Malawi and back to South Africa in pursuit of baskets and makers.
You have worked in cane, willow, rush, straw, bark, oak, hazel, cardboard, fabric, leaves, paper. You have travelled back in time making replicas of old fishing baskets and a Roman lid thrown on a bonfire in 101 AD. You have taught, talked, demonstrated, researched, copied, organised exhibitions and competitions, exhibited and sold your own modest work.
This week you have a newly purchased willow rattle, found in a charity shop window, which you are certain was made by another basket maker you often heard tell of in Edinburgh but never met, the travelling man Jimmy White. It’s the pattern he used, bottle tops inside to make the sound. You are spellbound by this latest acquisition and the story it has to tell. You determine to copy it in the morning. You count out the willow rods you need and put them in to soak.
It’s a life long journey.
Filming at Seahouses, Northumberland, for Countryfile which will be shown on July 19th at 7pm. I am demonstrating the Northumbrian fishwife's back creel.
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More baskets and quick makes.
August 15th 2015. I was asked to make a Mudag or Fleece basket recently for a lady in New Jersey as a surprise present from her husband ( what a nice guy). They had seen one in the Museum of Scotland. This was the one I copied when I first made this basket - I used a mixture of brown willows. Here is her blog about it.
My new treasurePosted by Charlene Marietti
The box was big, but light--and not addressed to me. Even the postwoman remarked how light the large box was. And from the U.K.? M hadn't mentioned ordering anything, especially something from overseas. I suppose I should have been a little suspicious when M said, "You open it." But I wasn't.
And all the better for a complete surprise! It was a mudag!
If you have been following this blog, you will have seen my photo of a mudag at the National Museum of Scotland(NMS). I loved the simple and practical woven willow basket made for storing wool for spinning at first sight.
I confess that I was so taken with the unusual basket that I considered trimming branches from a weeping willow tree that had been downed in July's storm. Some common sense prevailed because I didn't. That is certainly because I am not a basketmaker--and not because I wouldn't like to be. I must set some limits on my omnivorous approach to fiber arts.
Knowing how much I had admired the basket and a little concerned that I might carry through on my 'thinking out loud' and carry my pruning shears down the road, he secretly started researching the baskets.
For one, they're known as mudags. According to Woven Communities of Scotland, they are also known as muirlags, mulags, crealaghs or craidhleag. The one in the NMS, which was labeled only as a wool basket, was collected on the Isle of Skye in the Inner Hebrides where it was known as a crealagh. What is known about the baskets is described in more detail here.
M also found Liz Balfour, a basketmaker in East Lothian, Scotland. One of the founders of the Scottish Basketmakers Circle, she says, "The Museum basket was the one I copied originally many years ago but I have seen quite a few since then. They are rare and only a few survive in museums."
God's Eye on each end of the
mudag (Photo: Liz Balfour)
Besides the fact that mudags were woven for utility rather than for beauty or artistic expression, there is speculation that few have survived intact because the basket was often kept near the fire to keep the wool warm and easier to work. Some surviving baskets are burnt on one side.
M commissioned Ms. Balfour to make a mudag for me as an anniversary gift. (It soon will be 48 years.)
A handcrafted treasureResources indicate that most modern mudags are based on the photograph and dimensions of the mudag collected by Dr. Evelyn Baxter on the Isle of Skye and recorded by Dorothy Wright's in her book, "The Complete Book of Baskets and Basketry." Mine is about the same size she records: 19.5" long, 12" diameter with an opening of 6.5" x 5.5," but differs slightly with its God's Eye on each end. There are no feet so, ostensibly, it can roll. But it doesn't. It just sits beautifully by my feet.
Spinning from my mudag
In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't try this on my own. For one, the willow used in the baskets isn't from the tree, but from a shrubbier species. One U.S. basketmaker grows 60 varieties of the genus Salix, but none look like the tree. Makes perfect sense. For another, mudags are difficult to make even for experienced basketmakers. One unidentified basketmaker recounts her experience recreating one for the Highland Folk Museum.
I am delighted to have such a beautifully crafted mudag--and grateful to have a husband who so thoughtfully supports--indeed, feeds!--my love of unique and beautiful handcrafts. My mudag is full of wool roving--so I depart somewhat from the traditional storage of fleece or rolags. Rewarding as carding wool and making rolags may be, it's time consuming. And since my list of 'want-to-do's' is long, I need to takesome shortcuts.
The box was big, but light--and not addressed to me. Even the postwoman remarked how light the large box was. And from the U.K.? M hadn't mentioned ordering anything, especially something from overseas. I suppose I should have been a little suspicious when M said, "You open it." But I wasn't.
And all the better for a complete surprise! It was a mudag!
If you have been following this blog, you will have seen my photo of a mudag at the National Museum of Scotland(NMS). I loved the simple and practical woven willow basket made for storing wool for spinning at first sight.
I confess that I was so taken with the unusual basket that I considered trimming branches from a weeping willow tree that had been downed in July's storm. Some common sense prevailed because I didn't. That is certainly because I am not a basketmaker--and not because I wouldn't like to be. I must set some limits on my omnivorous approach to fiber arts.
Knowing how much I had admired the basket and a little concerned that I might carry through on my 'thinking out loud' and carry my pruning shears down the road, he secretly started researching the baskets.
For one, they're known as mudags. According to Woven Communities of Scotland, they are also known as muirlags, mulags, crealaghs or craidhleag. The one in the NMS, which was labeled only as a wool basket, was collected on the Isle of Skye in the Inner Hebrides where it was known as a crealagh. What is known about the baskets is described in more detail here.
M also found Liz Balfour, a basketmaker in East Lothian, Scotland. One of the founders of the Scottish Basketmakers Circle, she says, "The Museum basket was the one I copied originally many years ago but I have seen quite a few since then. They are rare and only a few survive in museums."
God's Eye on each end of the
mudag (Photo: Liz Balfour)
Besides the fact that mudags were woven for utility rather than for beauty or artistic expression, there is speculation that few have survived intact because the basket was often kept near the fire to keep the wool warm and easier to work. Some surviving baskets are burnt on one side.
M commissioned Ms. Balfour to make a mudag for me as an anniversary gift. (It soon will be 48 years.)
A handcrafted treasureResources indicate that most modern mudags are based on the photograph and dimensions of the mudag collected by Dr. Evelyn Baxter on the Isle of Skye and recorded by Dorothy Wright's in her book, "The Complete Book of Baskets and Basketry." Mine is about the same size she records: 19.5" long, 12" diameter with an opening of 6.5" x 5.5," but differs slightly with its God's Eye on each end. There are no feet so, ostensibly, it can roll. But it doesn't. It just sits beautifully by my feet.
Spinning from my mudag
In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't try this on my own. For one, the willow used in the baskets isn't from the tree, but from a shrubbier species. One U.S. basketmaker grows 60 varieties of the genus Salix, but none look like the tree. Makes perfect sense. For another, mudags are difficult to make even for experienced basketmakers. One unidentified basketmaker recounts her experience recreating one for the Highland Folk Museum.
I am delighted to have such a beautifully crafted mudag--and grateful to have a husband who so thoughtfully supports--indeed, feeds!--my love of unique and beautiful handcrafts. My mudag is full of wool roving--so I depart somewhat from the traditional storage of fleece or rolags. Rewarding as carding wool and making rolags may be, it's time consuming. And since my list of 'want-to-do's' is long, I need to takesome shortcuts.