recycled basket

This past school year, Eva’s class had two big focuses outside of their standard curriculum: 1) What is art? 2) How can we help the earth? It was very cool to hear all the things she had to say about it. Toward the and of the year, she curated an art show in the hallway, which anyone could submit to as long as the materials used in the work were recycled. So, when my friend Lisa mailed me this article on companies, including timbuk2, making bags from waste, I had to share it with my little girl.

The woven ecoist bags that are featured in the article are very cool. Eva wanted to get one for her teacher. Then I remembered a little something from Craft (05, I think)–it had an article that showed you how to weave a basket in the same fashion as these bags. Well, wouldn’t that make a nice end-of-year teacher present!

Eva and I worked on our basket together. She could do many of the steps, but this really isn’t a kids’ craft. I sliced up pages of the Land’s End Kids catalog with my rotary cutter (I keep an old blade labeled “paper”), then we both folded strips (fewer strips than the article suggested because our pages were shorter, but still a multiple of four). Eva could weave the individual sides, but when the going got tough, I took over. Then when the going got tough for me, I suppressed all the words that would have made Eva’s teacher unhappy, and baby-stepped through it. It was fun! I see more of these in my future.