Spend five or 10 days in this basket making intensive, where you will making simple baskets with complex connections. Learn to ethically harvest, manually process, and hand-weave right from the Northeast Kingdom landscape using ash, willow and birch while exploring the historical and cultural significance of this ancient craft.
You have the option to take only the first portion of the series and focus on ash basketry for 5 days or, if you’d like to broaden your skills further and learn about willow and birch basket making, you can register for the complete 10 days.
Weaving the Landscape I: Ash Basketry (June 5-9, 2017)
In this five day basket making intensive, we will create simple baskets with complex connections. We will harvest, manually process, and hand weave right from the Northeast Kingdom landscape using ash, while exploring the historical and cultural significance of this ancient craft. Note: If you’re interested in Weaving the Landscape II: Willow & Birch Basketry, you must first take this course as a prerequisite.
Weaving the Landscape II: Willow & Birch Basketry (June 5 – 16, 2017)
In this five-day basket making intensive, the second in a series of two, we continue making simple baskets with complex connections—this time, using willow and birch. We will harvest, manually process, and hand-weave right from the Northeast Kingdom landscape, using willow and birch, while exploring the historical and cultural significance of this ancient craft. Note: Weaving the Landscape I: Ash Basketry is a prerequisite of this course.
Faculty Bio: Prin van Gulden has been weaving baskets for a decade. She is most passionate about weaving traditional styles of baskets that have a specific purpose: the hen basket, the potato basket, or the birch bark salt cellar, for example. She explores how these baskets fit into village life, the homestead, a trapper’s lifestyle, or wherever the form originated. Prin, a 2007 Sterling College alumna with a degree in Sustainable Agriculture, lives and works on diversified farm producing cattle, sheep, chickens, veggies, and mushrooms. She teaches fiber arts classes and workshops at the College and beyond. Though the days of a mother-farmer-teacher-craftsperson are beyond full, Prin always makes time to tinker and craft, deepening her knowledge about about traditional and land-based crafts skills such as felting, spinning, knitting, weaving, natural dyeing, and basketry.
