Field Notes Archive - January 2025
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We’ve had a quiet, snowy start to the new year.
I’ve been taking an online class with Alice Fox, my teacher at the Tear Up Festival last August. The aim is to “help you creatively engage with your local area,” through various methods of recording, and working with gathered materials.
Gatherings from the acreage, and a hummingbird nest that had fallen on a nearby trail
When the weather was still moderate and clear, I collected all sorts of bits and bobs, choosing only to pick up what had already fallen, or passed (pictured above). Among the dried willow, flowers, berries and nuts, a theme of discarded husks and homes of various creatures emerged:
A snail’s shell
“Tiles” from a snapping turtle’s shell - they fell apart like puzzle pieces!
Snakeskin
A hummingbird’s nest
Each of these beings had long moved on from the lives they led in these spaces, leaving empty, evocative textures, and much to the imagination.
We recently watched the new movie Here, and I just finished the book North Woods, both of which explore many lives lived in the same place, through compelling compressions of time. I hadn’t planned the pairing, but 2025 will hold our 8th year on this acreage, and my 40th birthday, so this particular form of examining life, and time, feels like a fitting theme to start from.
Undoubtedly, these thoughts and threads will inspire and affect the work I create for class, which will continue through March.
Elsewhere, Dan has been working diligently.
As he harvests and processes our willow plants one by one, Dan’s been absorbing the words of Wendell Berry, and others, who infiltrate and inspire daily conversations about all that we’ve done, hope to do, and hope to be. I suppose this brainstorming of firmer convictions for the future is our own version of New Year’s resolutions.
A rhythm of cutting and gathering large piles in the fields on clear days, and then sorting through it all in the shed on snowy and rainy days, has taken shape. It is cold, tedious work, both inside and out, but the results are organized, beautiful, and satisfying.
As our meager, homemade racks fill up with colors as vibrant as they’ll ever be, and as the first weekend of 2025 settles in, so does the snow.
It’s a shapeshifting blanket on the landscape, giving the look of our new year both a fresh and familiar feeling. After so much travel in 2024, it is good to be home, thinking about what comes next.
Originally published on January 5, 2025
Make Do
it was 11° when we took these photos
All of the willow harvested in December has been processed, bundled, and put up to dry, but it’s been too cold to gather more.
With a halt in progress, Dan seized the opportunity to shake the dust off his weaving hands and play with some leftover basketry material from 2024. This beautiful set of rope coil bowls was the result.
I’m no longer surprised when he asserts that’s there’s barely anything left, and then turns out some of the most fantastic pieces I’ve ever seen.
Make do, indeed.
Along with the cold, we’ve had ample snow and blinding sunshine, resulting in frustratingly blank/blown out scenes for photography, so it was my idea to (literally) throw some snow into the frame for this shoot, which turned out pretty magically.
It’s hard not to feel like we’re already behind though, even though we’ve only just hit double digit days in the first month of the new year. But, our first class is in 117 days, our cuttings shop opens in 48, and the harvesting window closes in 77 - a veritable blink when we’ve done the math and realized it takes 3 days to cut, process and bundle each 100 foot row of willow, of which we have 90.
The numbers don’t add up, but we’ll manage.
when baskets make snow angels
Last year we lost about a month of harvesting time to relentless rain, and the current, bitter cold has caught us by surprise. Winters like this felt lost somewhere in time, but here we are, warm behind windows, with willow on the other side, too frozen to cut.
Undoubtedly, more hospitable days are on the horizon. The only option is optimism.
Before Foggy Blossom, winter days used to feel like they were circling the drain in a (not entirely unwelcome) washing away of idle time. Now we live in wayward, endless work throughout every season, the intensity of which slowly spirals in and out. And no matter the circumstance, Dan always answers the call of carpe diem.
I’m thankful for his lead, trusting that progress is never truly halted.
Originally published on January 12, 2025
Bending Frames
waiting for warmth
Relentless snow continues to put a pause on harvesting.
In the wait for warmth, we’ve been pivoting to other tasks, like bending dozens of frames in preparation for several upcoming workshops this summer. The process can begin with freshly cut, green rods, or with dried, brown ones, either soaked or steamed.
Dan has been doing the latter, forming steamed material (willow or hazelnut) around our handmade molds, which they’re then tethered to. After days, weeks, or even months (depending on a variety of conditions), they’ll fully acquire their new shape.
a rod newly wrapped around a mold, and one that’s been removed after it finished drying
Once that new, curvy memory has taken hold on the formerly linear line, Dan removes the rod from the mold, and begins to carve long tapers into each end with a draw knife. This allows them to overlap and fit together, creating a seamless arc.
We prepare sets of frames for students ahead of class because of the unpredictable timeline it takes for the rods to fully dry into place, but also because getting the fit just right is a tedious process, requiring a frustrating amount of finesse.
Our workshops often feel like a race against the clock, so having hoops ready means we can focus on immediately connecting them, and weaving within the skeleton. That gets us well on our way to hopefully finishing the basket, but if interest arises and time allows, we do teach an expedited version of this frame-making technique.
Maybe some day we’ll offer a workshop focused solely on material preparation.
Right now nearly every mold in the studio (20 or so) has a rod wrapped around it, with many dozens more to go. Most baskets start with 2 hoops, but some require 4, and it looks like there will be much more steaming, bending, and whittling of willow in our immediate future.
These are not the tasks we expected, or hoped, to tackle in January, but I suppose we should always anticipate winter to show up as its snowy, frozen self, even if we haven’t experienced it that way in quite in a while.
Up until this year, we’d been lucky enough to not be literally iced out of our own fields.
Despite the forecast’s continued thwarting of our increasingly time sensitive harvest (negative digits on deck this week), the opportunity to shuffle tasks, and pivot priorities, reminds us to loosen our grip, and remain flexible - bending instead of breaking.
Willow’s wisdom strikes again.
a set of frames, and a fully woven frame basket
Originally published on January 19, 2025
The Process
I envy Dan’s dedication to his craft.
When it comes to willow, and basketry, he’s always focused on learning each aspect thoroughly, from beginning to the end, without skipping a single step in between.
Historically, I’ve been much more haphazard as I lose myself in a brainstorm of ideas, make a few impulsive moves towards realizing them, then ultimately leave a series of loose, unfinished ends across a mountain of different materials.
If I had been the one who’d been intrigued by basketry, I likely would’ve tried to weave without a plan, using a tangle of unsorted and unprepared rods, expecting something to turn out. There are folks who can do that, but not me.
Dan didn’t find basketry until he turned 40, and being 7 years younger, I suppose I’ve used that milestone as a north star to aspire to.
Like me, he’d had flirtations with other focuses in his younger years, including screen-printing, wedding photography, and more. When we met in 2011, his creative pursuits had dwindled to just gardening, but for the first 7 years of knowing one another, he was haunted by an inextinguishable ache to find his thing. I suppose we both were.
There is a certain suffering that comes with feeling as if there’s a path for you out there, but you just can’t find it. When Dan finally found willow, it gave me hope.
Despite often feeling like I wasted so much time, with so little to show for it, I have gleaned wisdom from every wayward exploration. And with about 7 months left of my 30s, my ironic epiphany appears to be that my things (writing and photography) have been here all along - eclipsed, perhaps, by shiny object syndrome.
Thankfully, maturity seems to make these things appear far more matte, if you will, which somehow yields lucidity. The rest just falls away.
My approach to making will always be more amorphous than Dan’s strict diligence, but there are parallel arcs to any ambitious pursuit - namely the inescapable grueling bits as you work to improve. We find solace in sharing them with each other.
This week we were both tackling particularly complex projects, and a prominent note to self kept emerging, which Dan resorted to taping onto his bench as a reminder:
“14 · 25” were the measurements for this piece of weaving
Other things we often say —
I rushed and made a mistake.
Slow down.
I tried something experimental, but realized quickly it wasn’t going to work.
Learn the rules before breaking them.
I feel humbled by failure, and want to give up.
Remember the agony of choosing nothing to fail at.
I’m worried about all this winter space and idleness.
Remember how much you wished for it in summer.
In the face of doubts, distractions, and the dissuading snail’s pace of growth, continue.
When the reward for finishing something is simply the chance to do it again, seize it.
There’s no escaping the need to chop wood, carry water, forever and ever.
So, as I continue settling into my version of committing to a craft, following Dan’s mid-life model, I realize it’s this process of learning, trying, refining, and repeating, that I’m actually committing to.
Any envy I felt was for the steady sense of fulfillment that these things bring.
