My New Sweetgrass Plants are Here!!!

My new sweetgrass plants arrived this past Friday and I couldn't be more thrilled with them!  They came from Redwood City Seed Company in California.

I bought 6 plants, but to me they were more like plugs... much more than I had expected and were packaged very well.  They also came with very clear instructions for planting.  So, off to the garden center I went to buy potting mix, bone meal, blood meal and liquid fish fertilizer...

So, while my plants were soaking in the liquid fish solution, I put planting mix in the pots... added bone meal and blood meal... 

There is about a 1' of space around the plants and these pots will sit on my deck railing.  We had a gentle rain most of that day and the next, so they were off to a pretty good start... I hope.  With weekly feedings, the planters should be pretty full of sweetgrass by the end of the summer, yeah!  Wish me luck...

Lidded Paper Acorn Basket

Since some of my favorite natural materials to weave with are ash and sweetgrass, both not native to Long Island, I have been adapting paper and jewelry cording into my basket designs to recreate some of my favorite basket styles.

This one is called an acorn basket and is another New England Native American style basket.  The mold used for this is a round bun foot mold and the paper is again, cardstock.  To mimic the sweetgrass on the lid, I've used jewelry cording.

This cording has a shades of green that vary from dark to light just like sweetgrass that varies in color from the light root ends to the dark tips... it also has a slight overall brownish hue... somewhere in between fresh dried sweetgrass and some that has been aging for a while.  The base spokes or standards need to be tapered just as if it were black

ash, so that I get a nice tight bottom.  My "start", shown here in black thread was meant to be removed after the first few rows, but since this is a prototype basket, I liked it and left it in.  The sides were turned up, a wider row was woven so that I can add a row of porcupine curls... then the rest was completed mostly 1/8" weavers.  The basket weavers were hand cut further to 1/16" to keep everything close.  The body of the basket was also finished with a wide row and skinny rim.  I was going to lash with the "sweetgrass" thread, but didn't... the lid was completed in a similar set up, but most of the weavers were the imitation sweetgrass... I finished the whole thing with a lid ring and porcupine points.

This is a cool view of the inside showing the tapers... looks like a spider web right? It has been said that the spider is the Mother Teacher of all Weavers... hmmm, nice!