Straw work hen basket made at 3 1/2 day workshop with Annmarie O’Sullivan at the Basketmakers’ Association Spring School, April 2022.

A brilliant much needed rejuvenating week, mostly being covered in oat straw, learning continuous plait weaving techniques, making my interpretation of a hen basket. Originating from Orkney and West Ireland, our workshop made various straw explorations into recreating baskets and mats and more…

Straw, camaraderie and the pure joy of making, lively banter, wisdom and light, and one very spirited sculptural looking hens’ nesting basket. During this workshop, which was the first time that I had played with this material, the sculptural properties of straw began to take root. The ability to continuously plait straw and potentially lots of other fibres in this manner through space and time became intriguing.

Unlike the curvaceous cylindrical hen baskets being made by everyone else at the workshop, my hen basket seemed determined to become a straw volcano. Fortunately I subsequently found an illustration of a more conical shaped hens’ nest basket once made in County Mayo.

As well as making taets, flackies, sookans and simmans the group made a rather fetching pair of Strae-beuts, (leg warmers), and a St Brigid girdle of straw that encircled us on our final day.

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.”

Whilst Heaney is recalling the ritual blessing of stepping through a woven straw hoop, that represents St Brigid’s girdle, he 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.