Willow planter basket

My husband brought home another load of willow branches, and I used about half of it to make a large, bottomless basket as an enclosure for plant pots.

The whole thing took over six hours:  stripping leaves off branches, braiding all of the sufficiently flexible branches into a very long, one-inch-wide braid, loosely coiling and stacking the braid around a two-foot-diameter stump table into a basket form, and then weaving stiffer branches down between the braids--first a few branches, and then taking the semi-structured basket off the stump and putting in the rest.  A hammer would have helped toward the end as the coiled braids tightened up.

It helped that all the branches and I were out in the rain for some of that process, so they didn't dry out while I was working.  The basket is now drying, will need trimming, and definitely has what decorators call "presence".  I will make some kind of a liner for it, later on.

The thinnest willow branches resemble wicker, but are not nearly as strong.  I peeled bark from some of the thicker branches, experimentally, and the bark is not very strong either.

Willow branches

My husband came home with a small load of fresh willow branches.  The thinnest branches are flexible enough to tie in a simple knot.  I'm not good at basketweaving yet, but I know enough to get started, and I've been experimenting as I go.  I started making a bike basket, and got it two-thirds done.  It is really three basket weavings, front, back, and sides/bottom, which I am joining together. 

Twining--weaving with two strands which are twisted between each spoke--is working well.  Braiding three twigs produces a fairly strong strand.

Some branches may end up in a homemade broom.  I think I may try bending and drying a couple of handbag handles.

Towel hangers

A household problem I've been chewing on for a while is where to hang all the bath towels.  I didn't want to attach anything to the wall, and we don't really have bathroom wall space anyway.  There is one corner where something like a coat tree could fit--if the towels were the length of hand towels.

I have thought of cutting all the bath towels across the middle and hemming them; that would be a little hard to sew and still wouldn't really address the problem of quantity hanging space.

What I finally came up with was to pull some spare plastic shower curtain rings out of storage, and put them on the shower rod between the rings holding the shower curtains up, without snapping them closed.

Most of our towels still have homemade loops on them from when I was hanging them in the previous house.  So now I can hang them outside the shower curtains.

The landlord's shower curtain rods are moderately cheap ones, so I limited the number of added rings to a usable minimum.

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We went to a yard sale today, where they were charging $5 per grocery bag.  I found some books and fabric, a sewing pattern, and a single shoe last, four sizes too small for me, but it is interesting to see how it was made to come apart so it could be taken out of the finished shoe.

The children also found several things, including useful household items for their future homes.

Temporary deck table

The small table we had been using on the deck has gotten wobbly and weather-beaten, and is now out in the playhouse.

To replace it, I started with the cable spool end that I've used in the living room before, and then I thought about how to make a base for it.  The spool end still has half of the spool shaft on it, so the base would have to be hollow in the middle.

The easiest option was to pull some chunks of 6x6 redwood deck beam out of the garage, and stack them log-cabin-style.

These chunks I had originally cut up to stand on end and tie together as sort of a piered chair, and they were individually painted.  There were also some redwood deck stiles, which I had used as table legs some years back, which I used for one layer in the stack.

The final result looks good enough, and better than it ought to.