Look what I made

I dislike throwing things away. Many of the projects that end up on here are the result of me trying to find alternatives to sending stuff to the dump. This week it's the result of me cutting back some of the honeysuckle growing between my and the neighbor's yard. It was trying to eat the sign we made in welding class! It had to go. But what do I do with a bunch of vines? Try to make a basket before they harden up? Sure, why not?

I tried to use the method I learned in Scout camp with much less than thrilling results. Having failed that way I started developing my own way of making a basket. I started by making rings out of the vines. You know, make a circle and then start wrapping the vine around itself. To make a good one you may even need multiple vines. After I had five of the same diameter I ran vines through them perpendicular to the plane of the circle. Picture the 5 circles stacked on each other with a gap between them and 6 reasonably stiff vines passing through the edges of the circles. If the vines were long enough I had them complete an arc and come back through the edge of the circle roughly opposite of where it started. Then I just started taking the vines and weaving them through this way and that until the holes between vines were pretty small.

I'd refine the technique before trying it again, but what I got wasn't bad.

What started like this...

...became this.

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