January 15, 2021
The art of basket weaving is as ancient as civilization itself, and as much a part of Southern culture as bourbon and barbeque, particularly with the Gullah/Geechee sweetgrass tradition in the South Carolina Lowcountry (and the most famous living weaver, Mary Jackson, leading the modern charge).
Even now, eons after the first examples appeared in places such as Egypt and China to hold grain, textiles, foodstuffs, and more, basketry is still very much a practical art form. And there is perhaps no better time than the start of a new year in the middle of a pandemic to consider avoiding plain old plastic tubs and acquiring instead a few new (environmentally friendly!) woven options to corral the same kinds of stuff in your own home.
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This holiday season, you could bake cookies for your friends and family; you could watercolor landscapes on postcards; you could knit oven mitts or press flowers or compose clever little poems about fruit and write them by hand on scraps of vintage wallpaper. There really is nothing quite like a personal touch, especially in a year when personal touch has been hard to come by. Then again, you could always just buy things from stores. Perhaps this is less loving and intimate than a kombucha scoby you’ve named after their favorite child. But if you are planning to engage in gift-giving, it’s always helpful if the gift actually exists and if you’re anything like me, your creative ambitions are far greater than your capacity to actually create, especially in (ahem) these uncertain times. So here is a collection of nice things that would make nice gifts, mostly along a theme of the edible, or the edible-adjacent. Whatever you decide to give, I would sugge