Straw Work - with Annmarie O'Sullivan at the Basketmakers' Spring School, 2022

Day 1: Preparation and play. Scutching the oat straw to remove the grain and getting to grips with a new fibre. Learning cordage with straw, understanding what taets are and then making the very beginnings of the basket base. Equally brilliant to the making was to be around so many fantastic basketmakers, who share the passion and quirkiness of our craft form. Decided to embark on making a hen nest, not that I own any chooks but I wanted to understand how straw can be plaited and 3D shaped. Others chose to begin with flackies, straw mats that had a variety of uses, from being used to protect a horse’s back from it’s heavy load to being made into bed mattresses.

Day 2 & 3: Whizzed by in a blur. Using a Thraw crook we made a large long Sookan, a strong straw rope that was needed for a multitude of different uses in farming and crofting life. We used it slightly more for pleasure, a large game of skipping ensued, (well you had to, we were in the playground of a Ladies College!) and how could I nearly forget, after making Simmans, a less robust straw rope, we also made Strae-beuts. These leg warmers kept the chill out, apparently as you walked they sent a warm glow all through the body, and as you can imagine they looked rather fetching! I guess much needed in those cold climes… Straw, camaraderie and the pure joy of making, lively banter, wisdom and light, oh and one very spirited sculptural looking hen’s nest began to emerge.

Day 4 … I seem to be creating a straw volcano! Why is my hen nest determined to be pointy when everyone else at the workshop created curvaceous cylindrical ones? I’ll blame it on Annmarie intertwining her brilliant practical teaching with wisdom filed tales of wise women, witches and empowerment or the lack of it. Just channeling the energy I guess! Then phew - I came across an illustration of a more conical shaped hen’s nest once made in County Mayo. Perhaps they bred triangular shaped hens with very pointy combs there? The sculptural properties of straw were beginning to take root, the ability to continuously plait straw and potentially lots of other fibres in this manner through space and time, is becoming intriguing.

Day 5: To round off the week everyone met up in the college refectory for a mass ‘Show & Tell’. Had there been a prize, I think our straw work workshop might have won it for the most raucous group! The photograph shows us with our amazing creations of hen’s straw hen’s nests and flackies and all encircled by a St Brigid girdle of straw.

Within his poem St Brigid’s Girdle, Seamus Heaney wrote: “Twisted straw that’s lifted in a circle To handsel and to heal, a rite of Spring; As strange and lightsome and traditional; As the motions you go through going through the thing.” My thinking is that whilst Heaney is recalling the ritual blessing of stepping through a woven straw hoop, that represents St Brigid’s girdle, (yes my lovely fellow straw basketmakers and I did do this, gaining her blessing and having our health reborn for the coming year), but Heaney could also have been writing about the act of basketmaking too. Sometimes I feel akin to this when I work, you weave those who have gone before you through your hands, we imbue other basketmakers and our ancestors in an act of creating, crafting and honouring. It can be strange, lightsome and traditional.

By the end of the week I think I was almost euphoric to have spent time weaving together among my own kind, so much so that I poignantly wrote the following on Instagram - We are those that sometimes feel we don’t fit, but we are those that greatly matter, whether we truly realise it or not. Thank you to everyone at the Basketmakers’ Association for putting in such incredible hard work and effort. Thanks go especially to Annmarie and to all the brilliant tutors at the Spring school who with their incredible skills and depth of knowledge inspire, offer both fab business advice and true wisdom, and keep us fellow basketmakers doing what we do. Together we carry the gift of our craft on.