#mini basket

1:12 scale baguettes

I started these two baguettes last night at a friend’s place and I finished them this morning with a bake and final details with acrylics. 

Dandelion stem basket + felted rabbit! 🐇

This is the first one I've fully made this season, and I decided to take photos with a felted bunny I made a while back; also with flowers and the like!

I used strips of yucca leaf for the spokes and yucca cord for a little handle!

I've been collecting a bunch of stems, especially the longest ones (just for ease of weaving). It's just so much easier to wait for them to start growing long stems than to try to weave using the short stems of early season growth.

I've also been messing around with other dandelion crafts and uses. I can split and flatten the stems to use as a collage element. They look almost like very tiny fish or seal skins when you look at them for long enough!

You could sort them by color, glue them down, cut them into shapes, and use them as a unique visual texture!

I've also been doing some cooking with dandelions, which probably deserves its own post. Ive boiled some of the greens (and been finding ways to avoid their bitter taste) and fried the flowers in breading! I could also roast the roots to make a drink/coffee extender, which i may or may not do. More to come!

Heyo!

I haven't made one yet, but the way I make them is a technique called twining! It's a process lots of baskets use, i'm just doing it smaller than most examples.

As for coming up with it, I was actually inspired by someone's own dandelion baskets! I saw an instagram post by Michelle Mateo a couple years back where she made some lovely dandelion stem baskets. To my knowledge, she doesn't have any tutorials about them

So I certainly didn't come up with it, as people have been working with them for a good while!

They're definitely few and far between, but looking around, there are definitely some out there, including a youtube video specifically about harvesting!

A couple others I've found:

Back to the technique itself, I don't have any tutorial recommendations that *perfectly* encapsulate the technique I use, but I've found a few different things that might help:

this video has some good shots of the starting point, and the twining process, on a larger scale (even if it's lacking in actual instructions)

this site shows twining with stiff woody materials, and deviates in how I increase the spoke number, but is also good

and this is just a visualization of the weave itself:

source