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.
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