“So the way you start, you don’t have to taper these end, but there is going to be a little space in here. So what we’re going to do is take the first one. You can choose any spoke. They’re all exactly the same. So you start under and you don’t want to extend it past here, but you start under, and then this is over, under, over, and then I’m going to stop. I still have quite a bit of length on here, but you only want to weave as a section about this far. So under, over, under, over, under, and then stop. Now, some people have a tendency to keep going. So if you have to use a closed pen or something to close, been out there to make yourself stop do that. So this is at an angle. So I’m going to work toward the left. I’m going to pick up another piece and I’m going to start under, and then over, under, over under now, I’m going to stop. The reason I am not going any farther is because when I get these all in and I get back here, I’m going to have to do a reverse weave or a back weave or backwards, whatever you’d like to call it, to get those final ones in.”
“It’s a really hard basket to make too. And I figured out how to teach it a little bit easier than the way I learned it because you lay them out this way and then you weave in crossways and then you weave in crossways and shaker cheese basket. I do. I would think of it. I knew I would think of it. So it’s an all, it’s a very traditional shaker. It’s called a shaker cheese basket because what they would do is they will line this basket.”
“So I had a lot of questions about what do you do when you run out and as you can see, I’m running out. But I still have to go, Oh, a big chunk over here. Very easy. What I’m going to do is I’m going to go back. I always weave these as far as I can. And splicing, triple twining can be very tricky, very tricky. And if you don’t get the right weavers in the right order, it will just be wacky. So after I’ve gone under this first, the first spoke that I took, I’m just going to clip that off on the inside. And then immediately I’m going to insert a new piece and all I’m doing is putting that right behind it.”
“And I’ve often said basket making is like any other craft or art that you do when you do something in repetition, knitting, crocheting painting. And I once had a student who came fairly regularly and she came one evening after work. And she said, you know, I almost didn’t come. I have a splitting headache. And I said, well, you can reschedule if you’d like, Oh no, I’ll go ahead and try it. About 20 minutes into the class, I went and I asked her how her headache was and she said, what headache? So there’s the answer to the headaches craft glasses.”
“So you’ve got your length. So what you do is you find the good side of your read. Of course, you need to take it under, you can start anywhere. You take it under so that this is sticking out on the outside of the basket. Then my piece of round red, I’ve put the ants together and I’ve put it together like a hair, a pen, you know how a hairpin has that, that looped look that I’m going to hook it over this. This is the hardest part of this technique is getting it started. So I hooked it over there. I’m not going to push this down just yet, so you can really see the technique. So we’re going to have X’s on the outside of every other one. So I’m just going to take this. It doesn’t matter which one you take first, as long as you’re consistent with it. So this I take down this one up, so I make this X.”
We’re playing leap frog. So you have two friends and yourself, and you’re playing leapfrog where you jump over the people in front of you. Typically, you can only play with two people where you leap over, but we’re going to pretend like you’ve got really long legs. So I’m going to leap over these two and under this one. Okay. Now I like to teach with different explanations, different analogies, so that if you didn’t understand that you can understand a different way. So we’re going to play the train game. So we have a train here and this one is the engine. This middle one is the dining car, and this one is the caboose. So poor caboose always wants to be the big engine because the engine gets the most attention. So he’s going to jump over the dining car and that one in there he is. He’s now the engine.
