wwww.Winter Weaving with Willow and Wool

Long, dark evenings
This time of year offers little time for outside work and I am often forced inside by darkness, if not by the weather. I get twitchy on the long winter evenings. I am no stranger to the odd soap opera or two, but I find it hard to sit doing nothing. So winter is a time for planning new outdoor projects and a time for evening crafts and hobbies.
This year I am aiming to teach myself basket weaving. Over the years I have been on a few basket-making courses. Each time I have come back with quite a decent basket and each time I have felt that I could never make another without considerable help from a tutor. But now I have taken the plunge and started to make baskets all on my own. I have only made a couple so far, one from a book and one from a YouTube video. I am still at the stage of trying to blindly follow instructions and mistakes happen. But here are my two efforts.

Not perfect, but still useable.

Basket-weaving is a good hobby for me. I love working with natural materials and I love mathematical patterns. I also have umpteen uses for baskets.

A Holt of my own
So in my usual all or nothing style I have ordered 25 different varieties of willow to grow my own willows for basketry. I didn't know this before but such a willow plantation is known as a holt. At the moment my holt is merely a forest of little sticks lined up and poking out above a sea of landscape fabric. This is a necessary evil to keep competition from grasses and weeds down. I have gone for the thin fabric type rather than the thicker plastic type which shreds strand upon strand of plastic.
The whole is weighed down with old bricks, stones, planks and water-filled bottles. This stops the fabric flapping and tearing or lifting up and damaging the buds of the willow cuttings.

There are over 400 varieties of willow. Those suitable for basketry produce long, straight shoots if grown close together and coppiced every year. Some produce thin rods for fine basketwork, others thicker rods for more agricultural baskets. The range of colours is wonderful, browns, greens, reds, yellow, even blues and blacks.
They are supplied as cuttings, each about 25 to 30cm long. These are just poked into the ground and should pretty much all take root. It will be a couple of years before I am getting a decent harvest.

Until then I will have to purchase most of the willow rods for my developing basketmaking, though I have been cutting back some of my willows which I grow for living willow projects. The thinner sticks and some of the branches rods will be suitable for basket practice. Here they are sorted and ready for drying. Some of the rods will make excellent basket handles or frames for starting baskets.

Short Rotation Coppice
I have also planted an area of fast growing willows for Short Rotation Coppice (SRC). This is grown for biomass, either for burning or for chipping for mulch or to bulk up the compost heap. I should have started all these projects years ago, but I opted for ash trees instead as they are the common local species and are excellent for fire wood. However, the saplings were planted the year before the advent of Ash dieback and have not grown anywhere near as well as they should have, being severely knocked back every year. Unfortunately, tree planting is a long term project.

While I have been working with willow, Sue has been busy with wool. She is a member of the Woolly Crew, a subgroup of Fenland Smallholders Club. Each month they meet and share their crafts. Sue has been using the fleeces from our Shetland sheep for felting and for peg-looming.

There is a very practical side to this as she is busy making rugs for our tipi.

On the left you can see her efforts at incorporating Boris into a new rug design!

Sue has also been preparing a fleece for tanning. This is the fleece from the last sheep we sent off. Sue has been salting the skin for a few weeks and it is now ready to go to the tannery. We could attempt this ourselves but it uses some pretty nasty chemicals and it is difficult to achieve a good result. The tannery we are sending the fleece to is an organic tannery and hopefully the returned fleece will make it all worth it.

Meanwhile winter evenings are for snuggling up warm and cosy too.