I am lucky to have such a handy husband! I needed some basket legs, so I drafted up a pattern and three days later had these perfectly crafted oak legs in my grasp. He’s a wood-turning master, ladies and gentlemen.

Along with some reeds and some oak handles stained to match, I had all the materials I needed to make a wool-drying basket.

Wool-drying baskets are exactly what you think they are: baskets used for drying wool; usually woven in a plain weave and elevated on wooden legs that allow for extra air flow. The pattern I used was a twill weave, and it was both easier to weave and more beautiful than I expected.

While I don’t need it for drying wool, it’s perfect for holding all the yarn that used to be awkwardly wedged into the shelf where I keep all my craft supplies. It looks so lovely filled with balls of yarn that I’ve put it on display next to my fireplace.

As promised, baskets: the next victim in my ongoing quest to learn how to make everything. This is a potato basket, and the instructions came from this book by Lyn Siler. It’s an excellent book with a ton of beautiful basket designs and very clear instruction. The potato basket is a pretty simplistic one, and now I’m itching to try weaving some of the more advanced baskets. I started with this:

This is a bundle of #6 round reed and quarter inch flat reed. Along with a 10″ diameter wooden hoop for the rim and a little tung oil for color, this is all I used for this basket. Reeds smell a lot like hay, which had me constantly reminded of petting zoo smells. It was strangely more appealing than you might think.

As a fan of both containers of all kinds and weaving, baskets fit pretty perfectly into the realm of things I like. There will definitely be more to come.

Next up: methods for staving off the winter chill brought on by all this snow! Or if you’re not in a snowy place, just general winter coldness.

Well folks, do you remember way back in September when I promised you some surface designs? As it turns out, there weren’t really many blog-worthy dyed creations coming out of that class. A lot of what I made was experimental, and just so-so, and it can’t help that the instructor seemed more interested in reading the newspaper and discussing Lindsay Lohan than actually instructing. However, I learned enough about the dyeing process that I can now dye up some things in my own kitchen, without having to listen to celebrity rehab predictions. I’ll show you those just as soon as Christmas has passed (I don’t want to spoil any presents), but in the meantime, you can see a sneak peek underneath the first thing I made in my jewelry class:

Our first assignment in jewelry was to make a slot and tab bracelet. I am not a wearer of bracelets– too many bad experiences having to buy child-sized jewelry for my bird-bone wrists, I suppose. That and my general contrariness led me away from bracelets and towards necklaces, which I actually wear. So, I made a snake. It was cut from a sheet of nickel and sanded, and filed with tiny files. Next class I may put a bit of a patina on it, just for contrast. All in all, it came out pretty good.

You probably won’t  hear from me until after Christmas, because I’ll be working my fingers to the bone trying to finish up all the gifts I need to make– but I’ll be back soon after to show you what I’ve been working on. Until then, happy winter!