Woven Cedar Bark Basket

The sap is rising in the trees right now so it's the right time to gather bark for baskets. I just gathered some spruce bark for a folded bark basket and some cedar bark for various projects. I had some cedar inner bark in storage so I decided to pull it out and make a woven berry basket with it.

When you have collected a slab of bark, when it is still fresh or rehydrated, you can use a Jerry's Leather Stripper to cut out even strips that you can then use to make woven baskets. Traditionally, those strips were made by pulling the bark through sharp clam shells or rocks. These strips can then be dried and stored for future use.

Dried Cedar Strips from the Inner Bark

The day before you're ready to make your basket, put the strips in water overnight so they can be flexible when you're working them. They will be bent quite a bit and you don't want them to break!

Today we'll make a woven cedar strip basket, which I learned from Karen Sherwood at Earthwalk Northwest. The basket is a 3.5 x 3.5 x 3.5 inch cube. For that purpose, you'll need 20 strips of inner cedar bark that are 15 inches long and half an inch wide. I like working on a damp towel at that early stage as the strips may dry fairly quickly.

Pre-soaked Cedar Strips

Arrange the first 7 strips of cedar right next to each other.

We'll make the basket with a simple checkerboard weave so pick up another cedar strip and weave it horizontally through the middle of the vertical strips, going over one strip, then under the next, etc. Repeat these steps with the 6 other strips (3 above and 3 below the first one), alternating whether you start over or under the first vertical strip. Place those strips as closely together as possible so that there is no hole in your weave.

You end up with a 'plus sign' of strips with a woven center.

Next, you need some kind of string/cordage to wrap around the bottom of your basket. This will provide additional support to the basket as well as some potential esthetic value depending on how many threads of cordage you use and how often you will put them up your basket. Today I used some raffia, which is easily available at most craft stores.

We'll use the twining technique to go around the bottom of the basket with the raffia (the pictures below will demonstrate twining mid-strip but at this point you should do it right around the woven part of the basket, as shown just a bit later). So pick a long piece of raffia, bend it in half, and put that bend around one strip in the middle of one side of the basket.

Cross the left-hand end of the raffia over the middle strip and then under the next strip to the right.

And then repeat the process. What used to be the right-hand piece is now the left-hand piece that goes over the next strip and then under the next one.

Repeat until you've gone all the way around the woven center of the basket. Make sure the raffia is twined as tightly as possible without crushing the cedar strips.

I usually go around the basket twice with the raffia but you can do whatever you feel like for esthetic purposes.

At this point, the bottom of your basket it done!

For the next part, it really helps to have a block that holds the strips in place while you're weaving the walls of the basket. And it just happens that the King in the Kubb Game is exactly what you need! If you don't play Kubb... you should! Otherwise, just make a 3.5 x 3.5 x 6 inch block out of a piece of wood.

Kubb's King to the Rescue!

Bring all the strips up along the walls of the wooden block and wrap a rubber band around them to keep them in place. Make a sharp corner at the bottom so that your basket can have a nice square base. Otherwise, you may end up with a curved bottom!

Then pick up one of the remaining cedar strips, which should have remained wet until now, and start weaving it horizontally across the vertical strips, with the same over-under pattern. Again, make sure to cut sharp corners and that the vertical corner strips meet up tightly so that there is no hole in your basket. Make the ends of the horizontal strip meet on the inside of the basket, behind one of the vertical strips. Then repeat with another horizontal strip, making sure to alternate your over-under pattern from the previous strip, so that you maintain the checkerboard weave.

If you don't want to work with the wooden block for whatever reason, beware that your horizontal strips won't hold in place by themselves right now. You can use clothespins to pinch strips together at regular intervals but make sure to turn sharp tight corners or you'll end up with a barrel-shaped basket instead of a cube-shaped one.

Horizontal Cedar Strip Held by Clothespins

A nice design I like to make is having two horizontal strips at the bottom, then two rows of raffia, then one horizontal strip (sometimes decorated with a piece of bear grass or cherry bark over the cedar strip), then two rows of raffia, then two horizontal strips, then two rows of raffia.

Cedar Basket with Bear Grass Overlay

At that point, you've reached the most tricky part: finishing the basket! You should have one more wet strip waiting for you but the strips of your basket may be quite dry by now and they're about to be bent like never before. So it's a good time to take a little break, pull the basket away from its wooden block, and resoak the ends until they're very flexible again.

Ready?

First off, do NOT cut off the top ends of the strips! It's very important they remain long enough to be tied in their folded position.

Take a long piece of raffia and put it around one of the strips but this time with a short tail to your right and long tail to your left.

Take the last cedar strip you have and place it on the inside of the basket, directly above the last row of raffia, starting behind the same strip you have the raffia around in the picture above.

Take the long tail of the raffia, bring it up across the cedar strip in diagonal, straight down over the horizontal strip on the inside, then back out on the outside of the basket.

Then fold the cedar strip along the diagonal piece of raffia and tuck it behind the cedar strip on the right so that it's sandwiched between that strip and the one on the inside. Then repeat the process. Take the raffia, go up the strip on the right diagonally, now straight down over both the previously bent strip and the horizontal strip on the inside, and back outside the basket. Go all the way around the basket in the same manner. Make sure to make sharp tight corners so you don't end up with a roundish rim.

That's the way the rim looks like from the inside:

That's it! You can just do some final trimmings of your raffia or cedar strips if necessary.

Let your basket dry and then it'll be ready to go berry picking!

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