Guðrún Sveinsdóttir – Pine Needle Coil Basket

Location: Shire of Mountain Freehold

Wiki: https://wiki.eastkingdom.org/wiki/Guðrún_Sveinsdóttir

SCA Blog:https://gudrunsmusings.wordpress.com

How Did This Project Come About?

This is my first attempt at making a coil basket. This project was inspired by the basket-making videos of Sally Pointer, a historical reenactor from England who does “hedge-bothering” (foraging) and a variety of naturally-sourced projects. While my own basket is not a recreation of an extant piece, and while I have used some modern substitutions, this type of basket is theoretically period-plausible…somewhere in the world. This one was primarily an experiment in working with pine needles and using coiled binding techniques, but I will be delving more deeply into the history and extant finds in future basketry projects.

Historical Connection:
Baskets have been used for thousands of years by many different cultures all over the globe. The earliest known evidence of basketry is from basket imprints on pottery. In Europe, the oldest such impressive (ah, impressed) pottery is from the Paleolithic-Mesolithic era (over 27,000 years ago), found in Spain at Coves de Santa Maira. The oldest extant baskets, from the Neolithic period around 10,500 years ago, were found in Faiyum, Egypt. Coiled baskets are the most common of the earliest basket types.

In my full documentation, I also discuss several Viking-era Scandinavian finds and a late-period pre-contact Yup’ik find from Alaska, all of which help demonstrate the uses and prevalence of basket-weaving in a variety of contexts.

Techniques Used:

I started with a small bundle of white pine needles, about half of the diameter I wanted for the coils, which I covered with artificial sinew binding (again, modern substitution used due to lack of time to source a more period alternative). I then folded them into a small loop and lashed it together with the sinew, making sure to leave the ends of the needles bare.

To start coiling, I threaded the ends of the needle bundle into the tube and added more into the guide when needed to keep the bundle size consistent. I started wrapping the needle bundle around the central loop, securing it by wrapping a few times around with the sinew as I went, and sewing the sinew through the previous coil using a needle.

Once the bottom of the basket reached the size I wanted, I started pulling in the sides by binding the sinew tighter so that the new coil would overlap the previous one. This took a bit of experimentation to achieve the desired balance of tightness.

When I reached the side height that I desired, I allowed the needle bundle to taper off without adding more needles, and bound the ends tightly to the coil underneath it. I wove in the end of the sinew, and the basket was complete.

Lessons Learned & Future Plans:
I learned a lot during the making process. I knew that wetting the pine needles before working with them makes them less prone to breakage, and I knew they would shrink as they dried, but I underestimated just how much they would shrink. Therefore, the bottom of my basket and the first three rows of the sides are more flexible than I originally anticipated. Once I changed to using dry needles, the shrinkage stopped being an issue.

For my next basket, I plan to experiment with natural bast fibers (such as burdock or bramble) instead of sinew to sew the coils together. My hope is that this will help control the shrinkage, as both the coils and binding should shrink – hopefully at the same rate. I will probably make one basket using soaked needles and fibers, and another using dry needles and soaked fibers, to compare the different results.

Please see my full documentation for more details, my references, and pictures.