How Woven Baskets Are Made
Whether they’re woven baskets or books, woven storage baskets are an easy way to keep your home organized. Plus, their neutral color palette and organic feel meld with several design aesthetics, including bohemian, coastal, and farmhouse.
The process of making a basket involves hours of meticulous work by skilled artisans. These artisans use various weaving techniques to create a wide variety of shapes, sizes and designs. These weaving methods include coiling, plaiting and twining. All of these methods are used to bind fibers together to make a woven basket.
One of the most common forms of twined baskets is a Sally bag, a cylindrical, flexible, twined container made by Wasco/Wishxam weavers. This type of basket is also known as akw’alkt.
Function and Style: Embracing the Practicality of Woven Baskets in Every Room
Coiling baskets are a method of weaving that involves winding strands around each other to form a round shape. The resulting shapes are then stitched together to form the basket body. Coiling baskets are often decorated with a variety of patterns. Usually, the pattern is a combination of solid and dotted lines. In some types of coiling, a jog appears in the center of the basket. This is a transition from one row of stitches to another, and it can be up or down (Haida basketry typically has jogs that go up; Tlingit baskets have jogs that go down).
In plaited baskets, such as those made by the Twana people in western Washington, a full-twist overlay is incorporated into the wefts. Overlay consists of an additional colored weft that’s woven over and under the other wefts, and it produces diagonal decorative patterns.
