The penultimate session was a round table and open floor discussion about the future pretty

Scotland was very green last week when I went to the University of St. Andrews for the Woven Communities Symposium, and I couldn’t pretty closet stop looking at the beautiful grass everywhere. There is a dust bowl in my garden where the grass normally grows, as there hasn’t been any rain for over a month with temperatures close to 30C for most of that time.
A group of basket makers, conservators, archaeologists, philosophers, anthropologists, educators, museum directors, pretty closet curators   and artists met for two days to hear fragments of each others research and views on baskets and basket making. This Symposium was similar to the conference at University of East Anglia last year with several of the same speakers. This one, however, had a Scottish pretty closet focus to it. It was initiated by Stephanie Bunn, a textile artist, willow sculptor and lecturer in Social Anthropology at St. Andrews who is currently engaged in research into the vernacular baskets of Scotland with the assistance of the Scottish Basketmakers Circle.
This symposium had a practical element pretty closet each day which the academics present seemed to particularly enjoy. One of the anthropologists told me he had never been to such an enjoyable symposium and that it was because the makers and artists were all so passionate about their work.   For me it was an interesting, if tightly packed,   two days and although we were not a huge group there were still some people there that I never had a chance to talk to. Greta Bertram has written a good description of the event on the Heritage Crafts Blog.
The penultimate session was a round table and open floor discussion about the future pretty

closet of the craft but we had very little time for it. I found it to be the least satisfactory part of the event with ideas and observations left hanging pretty closet in the air.  I am an optimist and it seems, to me,  that the cultural and economic climate in Europe at this time is particularly propitious  for engagement with the craft of basket making by many different sectors of society. “Basket making” is really pretty closet a misnomer for all that this craft encompasses because it is possible, with these materials and techniques, to make plenty of things that are not baskets: jewellery, pretty closet buildings, sculpture, boats, fences, shoes, furniture.   The list is endless, and much of  it can  be done with little money and without causing undue harm to our ecosystem. Perhaps, it is both these things that make it so right for the time we are living in.
Baskets, traditionally, have always been sustainable, being made with the materials of the maker’s immediate environment. Ultimately biodegradable and requiring no fossil fuels for their production they are the perfect model for a contemporary product. pretty closet These are exactly the qualities that every product designer is now seeking for their products.There is a strong movement in Britain and many other parts of Europe and America towards the local and organic. I see no reason why anyone wanting to make a living pretty closet from "basket making" should not have a ready market for their work as long as they do not compromise the sustainability and authenticity of their products.
It was surprising then, to hear one of the speakers at the symposium make a point of stating categorically that it is impossible to grow willow organically on a commercial scale. Yet, prior to the invention and marketing of pesticides in about 1940 all willow was grown organically pretty closet and certainly in the 19th   and early20th Century much of it was grown for commercial pretty closet purposes. An example being Chiswick Eyot in the Thames, where, between 1800 and 1934 willows were grown for the local basket making industry and without the aid of pesticides.
Chiswick Eyot The commercial willow growers in the UK are mainly located in Somerset  and the reason they may find it difficult to grow organically is all about contemporary agricultural practice and the scale of it.  These willow growers, like most other non-organic

farmers, grow their crops in vast fields of single varieties and like most of the other farmers suffer with all the attendant pest and disease pretty closet problems associated with such practices. pretty closet Given the time scale between planting and harvesting the first willow crop – usually about 3 years – it is understandable that the Somerset growers are reluctant to rip up their fields and start again with smaller parcels of land and more varieties in order to grow organically. As willows have been grown in the Somerset Levels for centuries, long before pesticides were invented,  they could perhaps find out  how to do it from  old  maps of the area.
In an appendix to the Cultivation and Use of basket Willows produced

in 2001 by the Basketmakers pretty closet Association and IACR Long Ashton Research Station there is a list of the chemicals that have been tested on willow

beds for weed control pretty closet and it reads like a poisoners b