@pfooti · 2026-07-07 · travel

Making Baskets, Part One

You will probably see the whole Kishie build, end to end, in this post, but sitting and weaving a basket gave me a lot of time for Thoughts, so it will take a few posts to get through them all. If you don’t enjoy reading my meandering and self-doubt, well, just look at the photos and move on.

Straw being prepared. We needed to split a big sheaf into fourteen equal piles. The way I tried to communicate this is: Split it in half first, then for each half, do a tower of hanoi operation. Split sheaf in half, take right half and split in half again, and once again. Now you have sheaves of size 4, 2, 1, 1. Take one of the 1s and spit it the same way, giving a 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/8. Put the 1/2 with the 4, the 1/4 with the 2 and the 1/8 with the 1. Take the extra 1/8, and really that’s just a couple of straws, so do whatever. Now you’ve evenly spread 1/8th throughout the big bundle, and you can split the 2 and 4 bundles down into 1s and you have 7 total bundles (each about the same size, since you spread one of the 8 potential bundles proportionally into the 4, 2, and 1 bundle. Repeat for the other big bundle.

Upfront: I love experiencing other people's cultures through food and craft. I am definitely an outsider- for a long time my hat of choice was this thing I called the Hat of My People (or homp), which was a faded blue and white tropical print bucket hat I bought in a dollar store while on Oahu, it is so clearly a “this is a tourist who needs sun protection” hat that I wore it to be that. I hope it also communicates a little of “this guy does not take himself super-seriously”, which I try to project as well - I know I can be intense, so to wear a hat like that is to add a little self-deprecation to the intensity. I’m intense because I’m interested, curiosity drives me. Anyway.

You need to clean the straw a lot more than with the Skekler’s hats (mostly because the hats were much faster / single-use and kind of look cool when they’re messy, but the baskets with extra leaves or hulls will more likely rot). You twine 10 of the 14 bundles into a mat similar to the hats, except in the middle instead of at the end, and then you use the remaining four (two per side) folded in half as the space / shape pieces that give the basket its triangular cross section.

I am grateful when people share their cultures with me; when I travel I love taking cooking classes, these Thread Caravan trips are another form of this- we traveled to Morocco and Scotland (so far, I’m sure we will have more in the future) to other lands, other crafts) to learn from artisans who follow very specific craft traditions. This leg of it has been the Kishies and techniques of oat straw weaving. The artisans and artists who taught me on this trip were generous, kind and wonderful humans, who invited me to participate in a very specific form of craft, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about cultural appropriation.

After shaping the basket by adding in the sides, it is temporarily very difficult to work with. The coir catches on everything, the hay just goes william nilliam everywhere. but it is also quite satisfying to see the thing taking shape under my hands.

Kishie is a name for this particular kind of basket, it’s repetitive to say “Kishie basket” actually, but since most people don’t know the word (I sure didn’t) it’s easier to explain that way. It is, first and foremost, a practical object. It is crafted for a purpose (carrying things, usually cut peat or fish), but probably was used to carry whatever is needed. Both Wikipedia and the Shetland Museum support the idea that, while oat straw was the most common material, other materials were also used (rushes and a type of tule, both of which grow wild in Shetland). When I asked Catherine why she didn’t work more with tule (which is more supple and has better water resistance), she said mainly that she couldn’t gather enough, and long enough pieces to really make good baskets. It’s a matter of availability rather than (say) cultural or religious production here.

It surprised Chrissy how much I liked the act of weaving these baskets, so I should mention here: I had a really good time. It was physically challenging, but I could see the basket forming in my hands. It felt like I was learning some fundamental techniques (I could see how twining was like to but different from weaving, how it was used in these baskets, in the chairback forming that Eve did, and in our hats) that I could apply in a lot of ways. It was also just fun to take a bunch of grass and turn it into a shaped thing, much the same way as pottery is turning mud into something useful (or not useful). There’s just a joy to making.

It is something of my nature (my artistic tendencies?) to learn to do a thing, and then to immediately try and think about how I might want to alter that thing, change up the process a little to make it my own. When I bought the Dishoom cookbook, I took it home and tried cooking Chicken Ruby. The first time: it was great, I followed the recipe directly, even the fiddly steps where you make a spice mix and then only use two thirds of it and save the rest for later. The second time: it was pretty mid; I had tried to optimize the process and I clearly broke something in the spice development by reducing the time some stuff spent in the pan, or by changing the ratio subtly when I couldn’t add two thirds of a clove and eyeballed it. I went back to following the recipe thoroughly. On the other hand, a lot of my cooking is fusion- I take bits from Indian, Indonesian, Thai, Chinese cooking classes and books and mix them in with whatever I do. Is this appropriation? I’m just cooking for myself, I’m not instagramming or tiktokking this for clout, I’m not making a restaurant that’s called “Eric’s Restaurant that Makes Great Indian Food” while being a White guy. But still, it sometimes feels like a dirty secret.

On some level, to be a White American is to be an appropriator. My ancestors drifted away from their ethnic heritage- I make something like colcannon on Saint Patrick’s day (and on other days throughout the year, it’s delicious) not because I learned Irish peasant cookery from my Grandfather McCann, but because I tried some in a Trader Joes and was like “this is delicious”. This is not particularly insightful, better people than me have talked about this. One of my travel companions is Potawatomi, we talked about Braiding Sweetgrass, and I talked about this feeling of disconnectedness. On the other (or third, or fourth) hand, it’s also hard to really capture this feeling of disconnectedness without also sounding (internally) a little whiney. I’m the product of imperialism and oppression- my ancestors stole land and people, they made cultural memory a prohibited thing. We also forgot our own memory along the way, but maybe this is just the payment due.

The main shaping is complete. I need to still use a backstitch technique here to sew down the folded-over ends of the straw. The basket is a little bigger than I first expected- I hit a groove and went around one more time (the twining goes in a spiral up the basket, so you can just keep going if you want, but you kind of need to stop at the right place opposite where you started or else your basket will be uneven.

This is what it is like to be me: constantly thinking about everything. I’m tasting my disconnection from my history, my people. I’m regretting that my ancestors stole so very much, I’m noticing all the privilege I retain that derives from that theft. I’m wondering how much I can adapt a Kishie making technique to other materials without it being A Big Thing. This is probably why I make pottery the way I do. I want people to see my pottery and feel a little uncomfortable, I want them to spend all their time thinking, “but what is it for?”

I also learned the rudiments of making a rope from raw materials, but I didn’t have time to do that. I took the coir twine and coiled it to make a bigger rope, but that’s it. It is still pretty rough around the edges and imperfect, but I’m hugely proud of this thing, and have been thinking nonstop about how to make other baskets when I get home.

Meanwhile, Catherine is super-excited about my ideas to make baskets out of materials close to hand. When I talk about my weird approach to ceramics, making pots that try to make people feel uncomfortable, she immediately follows me on Instagram. Other tour folks, when I talk about this, point out the practicality of the Kishie, that it’s made from straw because straw is what was there. They point out that we were invited in to share here, and that I’m not going to go out and start teaching Kishies or taking away from the work that the Shetland Straw Society is doing, but instead maybe I could use my (miniscule) reach to amplify their work as much as is feasible on a blog with maybe a handful of readers.

Success! Eleven Kishies and one coiled basket (Eve has kits that teach basket making in a style that mirrors how you put backs onto the chairs, one of our group was sick on the first day so she made a coil basket instead). Also a little straw person Chrissy made with some French tourists that came into the room in the museum we were using as we made baskets, the kid wanted to make something so Catherine taught us all how to make straw people. (eveeunson.com)

I’m really overthinking this.

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