THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 18, 1996 TAG: 9602150044
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 99 lines
MOUSE-SIZED. Big enough to carry three kernels of corn, maybe four peas.
A market basket just the right size for a rodent. Perfect if mice actually shopped at the grocery.
Basket cases. That's what they are. It is the only explanation for why the weavers in the High Country Basketry Guild would spend five hours on a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon making something so tiny none of them could ever hope to use it.
Nantucket, Appalachian, free-form, knotted, willow, pine needle, splint, coiled.
Baskets are their passion. They read about them, use them, wear them, pay tons of money to learn how to make them. Since spring of last year, the 30 members of the guild's Tidewater Chapter have gotten together the first Sunday of each month, armed with scissors, knives, buckets, pencils, rulers, clothes pins, weaving materials and an unnatural supply of patience.
They talk about baskets. Even talk to them.
``C'mon, c'mon. Stay tight. C'mon,'' mumbles Anna Donnelly, fingering a scraggle of sticky waxed linen threads that, right now, look nothing like a basket but a lot like a spider with too many limbs.
Today's tiny basket did have a practical application last Christmas when the guild decorated a tree for the Holly Festival. The guild's stunning entry, done up with scores of miniatures, raised $475 for the Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters.
This Sunday's mini-basket lesson at Norfolk's Larchmont United Methodist Church is taught by the guild's president, Billie Dorris, a woman whose huge interest in weaving has blossomed for 14 years. She's won best-in-show at several area juried exhibitions. Her Virginia Beach home bulges with baskets, new and antique.
``It's to the point where my husband has told me I need to be like a museum and put some away and take others out,'' she says.
Dorris greets late arrivals today with just one question as they come through the door: ``Do you twine?''
Twiners and non-twiners sit side-by-side. After the business meeting the lesson gets under way.
Classes like this lure new members from as far away as Richmond.
Donnelly, 31, a telecommunications specialist at Fort Eustis, is a relative novice. She's been weaving baskets just two years, long enough to lose perspective.
``If you try it once, you're hooked,'' she says, jamming another tack into the tangle of threads on her workboard. She wishes for a thicker piece of cardboard.
Voila! Beside her, Pam Jilek whips out a hefty styrofoam square.
``I always come prepared,'' chuckles Jilek. She drove from Newport News loaded up with styrofoam and books on baskets.
Jilek, 44, has been weaving nearly seven years. Once, working on a dyed-reed egg basket, the dye infected her cuticles. She finished anyway.
``If I go three weeks without weaving, you can tell. I get nervous,'' she says, chuckling.. Jilek's Nantucket baskets are sold in The Mariners' Museum gift shop in Newport News.
Laura Langford and Sally Beckman drive in from Richmond. Langford's been weaving two years. She holds up her work. ``It's my first miniature.''
``And it's gonna be my last,'' grumbles Arlene Wallace, 48, of Hampton. She teaches basketweaving at the craft shop she runs on Fort Monroe.
While most of the women here today buy their supplies in a shop or by mail order, some go right to the source. The woods.
Mary Normand, 47, a customer engineer for IBM, camps with a re-eanctment group on a local farm where she weaves white oak baskets. From scratch.
Ella Mae King, 74, a retired secretary, is going to the North Carolina Basketmakers Association convention in Raleigh next month.
Conventions are where many a novice turns pro.
``Most people start out weaving for themselves,'' says Dorris, the president. ``But you can only give so many baskets to your relatives. Then you start selling to support your habit.''
Halfway through the class, Dorris checks on Barbara Nance, who says she hasn't learned yet how to weave and talk at the same time.
``Barbara, what have you done?'' Dorris asks.
``That's called reverse weaving,'' jokes Debbie Gegner as Nance confesses she's pulling out mistakes.
Genger, a fourth-grade teacher, taught herself to weave 10 years ago and now her baskets sell for $5 to $350.
The basket weavers have been at their project for three hours. Vicki McCloskey, who's never woven anything before, gets a calming pat on the back from Kathy Derstine, who teaches basketry at Virginia Beach rec centers and the Norfolk Botanical Garden.
``After you do this,'' Derstine tells her, holding up her own project, ``you can do anything.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
VICKI CRONIS/The Virginian-Pilot
It takes more than a pair of hands to begin making the base of a
miniature market basket.
Sally Beckman of Richmond drives to Norfolk for meetings of hte
Tidewater chapter of the High Country Basketry Guild.
by CNB