It’s all Sally Pointer‘s fault. I was just quietly playing nicely with lime bast and nettle, then she wrote a book and then she co-hosted a lime bast working day with Chiz Harward of Froe Wood Coppice Products where I had a lot of fun and encountered things made of bast fibres that I hadn’t thought of making.
Baskets.
I have clear memories of the boho stores (we called them ‘hippy stores’) of the early 1970s, full of tie-dye t-shirts, Nepalese silver trinkets, psychedelic posters and southeast Asian and African craft items. Lots of coiled baskets, stacks of them in the corners or lined up full of stuff I can’t clearly visualise (polished rocks? soaps?), everything smelling so strongly of patchouli that you didn’t have to buy any yourself. I miss those days, everything was so new, so shiny, so desirable when seen with young eyes.
It never occurred to me that those baskets were handmade. I had no interest in baskets. Ha.

Sally’s book includes instructions for making a coiled basket: wrap good lime bast around bundles of lime bast too weak for cordage, spiral the wrapped bundle out and up, stitching into the previous row to make a solid structure. I have LOTS of lime bast, I can do that.

It’s messy. Sheds lots of bits of lime bast onto my work desk, onto the floor, into my keyboard, onto my clothes and hence everywhere. Slow work, ideal for an evening in front of the tv, but too messy.
Wait. I can wrap other things with other things. I can wrap tapestry warp thrums (waste yarn produced when the tapestry is cut off the loom) with leftover or waste silk yarns.

This is the epitome of mottanai, the Japanese principle that drives boro repair and modern visible mending: it’s more than regrettable, it’s simply wrong to waste material that can be made into something useful. It’s slow, slow work but pulling the silk yarn tight around the core makes it shine, and the subtle variations in colour are beautiful. Inserts of other colours are the last few scraps of silk spun from fibre I dyed c. 2012, most of it used for tablet weaving. I wonder where that bag is?
You can see from the last photo that the constant handling of the forming basket has raised a halo from the silk yarn, making it fuzzy. This offended me: I wanted the stitching to be clear and crisp. I knew the fuzz could be singed off …

Many years ago we took Sara Lamb to the Camenzind silk mill in Switzerland to see commercial silk spinning. The spun yarn was de-gassed, the yarn passed at high speed over a red-hot iron plate to scorch off any halo so the final yarn was crisp and glossy. When we returned to the UK we tried to do something similar by passing spun yarn at high speed past a steady flame (heating iron red-hot on my cooker was NOT GOING TO HAPPEN). Needless to say we weren’t very successful, although we did have a lot of fun.

But how to do it? Careful application of my cook’s blowtorch, that’s how. Happy to risk everything in pursuit of perfection, that’s me.

Perfect.
Well. It’s not the shape I wanted. I had to undo and rework the little opening. Six strands of 18/2 cotton work up (relatively) quickly, but the coil is relatively coarse. Maybe if I make the bundle smaller?

Practice makes perfect. Four strands, wrapped with precious thrums of Sara Lamb’s hand-dyed, handspun silk.