Meeting 2 : Baskets + Banana Fiber
“Mother earth is not a resource, she is an heirloom.”
— David Ipina
After missing our January meeting due to snowy weather, we were grateful to gather again the first Thursday in February. We shared our baskets and learnings from the foraging and making process. As newcomers to the craft, we all followed a fairly free-form approach. We discussed a feeling of innate or intuitive knowing that seemed to flow when weaving vines together to create vessels and baskets. This is something our ancestors needed to do to collect and to transport. Now, in the industrialized age it is a hobby or an art practice.
Monika, a first time weaver who stewards a plot of land with an abundance of wisteria, created many different baskets of all shapes and sizes. Some of her baskets were made with kudzu core, some with kudzu core and bast fibers, and other explorations with early winter wisteria vines (some stripped and some raw). She noted in her research people mentioned wisteria does not shrink, but she discovered in her explorations there was shrinkage over time.
Below are two of our other first-ever baskets made with kudzu and other over abundant vines of Western North Carolina. Natalie’s basket on the right was woven while her daughter was collecting the vines. Both represent the tangled way ‘invasive’ vines grow.
Julia brought banana stalk and fiber they had been processing using by scraping a butter knife along sections of the stalk. We used a hand carder to further process, divide, smooth, and straighten the fibers and saw a significant improvement in fiber quality after including this step. We had to dampen the banana fibers before carding them, otherwise there was a lot of breakage when combing through the carder. The resulting fiber was fine, shiny, and durable. The ‘waste’ or loss from carding could make great paper or could be spun up to create banana yarn.
The Japanese banana plant is known as bashō, and the cloth is known as bashōfu. It is more delicate than kuzufu, and I think could be woven together to create lustrous and sturdy cloth.
See you in the weeds,
x Nica