Basket Weaving 101

 

   I dropped in on Tracy at Tango Zulu yesterday because I had heard something about the way that baskets are "reconstituted" after they come to her, packed tightly in a shipping box. She has baskets like you would not believe; I mean hundreds of baskets, literally crushed into the boxes they were shipped here in. Misshaped, creased, wrinkled, obviously no good for sale .... or so I thought.


   I thought that was the case until I met Tracy's employee Cathleen, whose job it is to take a few of these crushed pieces of reed and make them back into the beautiful baskets I see at our home and business.


   But first let me tell you about Cathleen. It is always exciting for me, a former business owner, to see an employee truly excited by her job,  her boss, the products she sells, the customers she waits on, even the guy who comes by, hoping to get a little "behind the scenes" info about the store she works in. She truly loves what she does, and Tango Zulu is a better place for having her there. That is one element of life in Port Gamble which I noticed to be almost universally true: The people who work here ENJOY working here. They enjoy the people they work with as much as the people they work for, which they seem to realize is the customer. 


   And now to the task at hand, opening the box of crushed baskets and making them useable. See what's inside  the box to the left? Each of the boxes they receive contains several more baskets of a variety of sizes, each needing to be soaked in water. IN WATER!? Won't that hurt them? No, much the opposite. Most of these baskets were made in rain forest country, with mud, water, hot muggy temperatures as a standard, used like a woman would use a purse. And you bet they got wet.




   But while they are wet a person can "get the kinks out", round the corners, smooth out the crushed parts, make them back into what we think are "works of art"  and what the people who made them think are "just another way of carrying things."

This basket to the right has been soaked with water and it is now ready for the hard part, the shaping. The water has not made the colors run, only made them brighter, which they will continue to be as long as from time to time the baskets get soaked.




   It was easy to see from watching Cathleen work that reshaping the basket had to be as hard as shaping it in the first place. But the effort seemed to get easier and easier until the final shape looked liked I would have expected it to in the first place.


I would have probably sent the baskets in the box back to where they came from (probably Africa), but no, selling beautiful baskets is simply a lot more work than it appears. Some stores may simply open a box and put out the contents for sale. Tracy's store has to rebuild their products before they are set out for the consumer.


While she was showing me all this, Cathleen and I discussed the finances of basket making. The manufacturing of them falls intro "fair trade" which means that the people who make them are paid a living wage, at least for the area they live. They are not getting rich by our standards, but their children have shoes on their feet. In fact their children are not allowed to work, according to the rules of the fair trade agreement, since child labor laws are part of the rules.


    We didn't discuss what those weavers making those baskets might actually be paid, but let's be realistic, even a "living wage" in some of those countries might not be much. But it is better than it used to be, and some day their living wage might be more like ours. Would it bother Tracy if that meant the price of her product went up? Not at all, she told me once, as long as everyone plays by the fair trade agreements. 


   Tracy, Cathleen, and the baskets can all be reached at their website. Their store is open in Port Gamble 10-5 every day.