We bring you this offering from a place of dedication to our weaving work over the past decade. Your support of this work through purchasing this class makes possible our ability to provide ourselves with basic needs like housing, the ability to feed and tend to ourselves and our communities, continuing our weaving and teaching practices as well as making this offering accessible to others. We acknowledge that we are all living within late stage capitalism, climate crisis, and continued and worsening injustices and exploitation of peoples worldwide.. This project is a dream and a seed we are excited to share, and although we want this offering to be available forever, we must disclose that it will exist only as long as it’s sustainable for us to offer.

We kindly ask that this course is purchased as individuals and not as groups and that you honor our offering by keeping this content close and that when you’re ready, share and teach in your own developed style to those who come to you to learn... please continue the lineage in a good way. 

Relationships take time. We encourage you to approach this craft as a personal exploration before a money making opportunity. As many of you have surely experienced, craft and art takes on a different feeling the moment you start doing it for money. Give yourself the time to practice and develop your own creative style and form,  have fun! We both came to this craft following a thread, chasing a muse… exploring ourselves and our potential, engaging with willow and the lands where it grows and relishing in those early years of learning. Asking questions, making mistakes, weaving baskets we’d never imagined weaving and ending up in places we never thought we’d end up. Our support and wish for you to give time and space to exploring this craft before selling this craft does not come from not wanting you to sell your craft. There is enough space for all of us and our offerings here, and we are in full support of the growing network of weavers. Our wish for you is to first enjoy the richness of those early years and to be able to witness yourself grow in your craft! 

Not every basket weaver will feel called to sell their work or teach classes, but for those of you that do feel called to do so we recommend connecting to other local weavers, developing friendships, relationships, and networks where you can share about your crafts and practices and support and guide each other through things like markets and pricing. And if you feel called to teach, find a teacher who is willing to let you shadow and assist! Be sure to offer them an exchange for their guidance! Remember that teaching is also a learning experience that takes time and some people like it and some people don’t. The point is to make this craft your own, and allow it to take whatever form it wants to take and give yourself and your craft the time deserved.

As human beings, we are all descendents of cultures deeply embedded in crafted objects made with wise and knowing hands. The craft of weaving baskets is an ancient technology of the hands that has been practiced by human cultures across time and space. Many of these cultural traditions have been fragmented, distorted, stolen, and forgotten as a result of colonization, empire, supremacy, migration, immigration, and assimilation. Basket weaving, and in this case willow basket weaving, is an invitation to travel the lineages that live in you and through you. . In making and teaching baskets in the ways we do we honor tradition and also allow our baskets and approach to basket making to change shape as the culture around us changes shape. As one of our basket making teachers says, ‘There is no wrong, only different’ May this space be a vessel that weaves, welcomes, holds, and uplifts the magic and wisdom of tradition and imaginative possibilities. 

In honor of tradition and lineage we would like to send a shout out to all the weavers who have shared knowledge, skills and techniques that have inspired and influenced us along the way.

 

Margaret Mathewson, Erin Fahey, Emily Derke, Casandra Johns, Zachary Fittipaldi, Maureen Walrath, Skelk Thibodeau, Gwendolyn Graovac, Rosemary Kavanaugh, Phera Galhotra, Brendon Farrin, Sophia, Mary Fraser, Sarah Lasswell, Shay Hohmann, Katherine Lewis, Eddie Glew, Aganaq Kostenborder, and Meshell Orozco