Here’s a bit of the back-story to yesterday’s post…

On 25th Feb we paddled the boat from Loch Voil to Loch Doine and back. It was a cold day, overcast, low light, clear water, dark trees.

   
While Alan was brewing up, I went off to explore the shoreline and came back with the usual handful of twigs plus a mess of monofil fishing line, complete with weight and rusty hook.

 
One of the things I love about exploring in the canoe is that you have somewhere to carry all the stuff you find (rocks, twigs, shells, litter…).

  
The twigs dried out nicely over the last month, still bendy enough to work with, dry enough to reduce shrinkage in the basket (I hope). Last week I unfankled the fankle of fishing line and weed, in preparation for this week’s basket-making. Monofil is tricky to photograph but I liked these images of work-in-progress:
   
    
 
To finished basket…

 
  
It’s the first time I’ve tried making a birch-bark base, and it’s an open basket so that the silver side of the bark is visible inside the ‘bowl’. The bark was off the tree and already starting to decompose when I found it, so the texture is rough and corky. Black thread seemed right for the stitching, it was a black and ochre kind of day.