willow baskets

Purchased from French and Belgian willow producers growing different varieties to which each year brings a little colour variation depending on the amount of rain and sun received. We have our favourite ‘Leentje’ and ‘Purpurea Daphnoïdes’ in brown willow and ‘Rouge belge’ along with ‘Noir de Villaines’ for the stripped willow.

Before they are soaked again prior to the final basket weaving process. That takes between six and 10 months. Meaning that once we run out of stock, we have to wait for next year’s harvest. This natural cycle is something we really appreciate: one cannot just go online and order an extra batch of it! It makes us cherish preciously every single rod and reconnects us to nature’s seasons and cycle.

Weaving brown willow (willow with its bark) often means waiting up to 12 days for the rods to soak sufficiently and become malleable; this is when using white willow (stripped willow) gets interesting. Only a couple of hours of soaking in the tank are needed and the final white willow baskets will be lighter and have a very pure aspect that we are becoming quite fond of. This is why we make our prototypes using white willow and then weave them with brown willow once we are happy with their general shapes and proportions.

Traditional French basketry has been our introduction to our willow weaving. We enjoy seeing the similarities with other European basketry and notice now and then slightly different techniques used by other basket makers.

Our contemporary work is driven by the desire to explore larger scale products without any specific usage, ending up indoor and outdoor and used in many different ways.