How to prepare honeysuckle vine for basketry

[Music] pull them and get or you can go ahead and just wind it up let it dry and store it and use it whenever you want by just soaking it for maybe 20 or 30 minutes like that and like really hot water all right so here's where we are starting some taters for dinner I set my tripod leg down right into the pain of it and busting my foil so the kids are going to get me another piece of foil to get over the top of that to get that going so we're gonna be down here a while but our pots not really boiling but it is very hot and honestly I think officially you're supposed to boil your willow or not willow your honeysuckle or like two to three hours initially and debark it and then store it but I've done it before where it was just like just to the point of almost boiling for couple hours because I just didn't stay on it and it was fine so I think we let look look I just saw a bubble I think another couple hours that this would be just fine honestly okay so I brought my honeysuckle in it's dark out now and we had dinner and it was delicious and just for comparison I wanted to show you I have no idea how much I'm going to get out of this because I've never done it in this pot but I've had this pot for 100 years and I love it bear with the room here it's kind of under construction but for comparison this blue pan here is what I used yesterday and I just I had to dump a lot of this water out so I could pick this pot up the pot itself is super heavy and with the water rocks it wasn't gonna happen for me so dumped it out and I'm gonna just put some more hot water over it but out of this pot yesterday this is what I got I made that basket and I had this left so we'll see what I get out of out of my harvest today but faster turned out really nice once you have your wines in the house all you have to do well what you have left to do is just most of your time is to get the bark off of the vine and usually I snap out the brownie just throw it out but just work on it and of course I get like the hardest one ever that's what you're doing and I like to use a rag and just rub it and usually that works just great but for some reason right now it's not being that wonderful there we go so you just go through your whole pot and do that that's it you I want to show you something that happened that I did not expect viens I'm trying to show you how to do this I figure I'm gonna show you what it's got me baffled right now and kind of what I've come up with I have always in the past this is what I come up with this is a huge vine and this line actually is off of what I showed you it's a huge line and it stripped down clean and beautiful white and that is what I would expect to see and actually a lot of these pieces from that and they'd turn out beautifully or what what I was expecting I'm not gonna say that the next isn't beautiful it's just not what I expected so what ended up happening was it was like 3:00 in the morning before I actually got the line to where I mostly had it stripped and I thought that I had it but um it just wasn't cleaning off like I wanted so to start with I am going to say that I probably should have boiled it like rapidly boiled it longer I usually go by this book this book is my favorite book ever in the history of the planet it is called back to basics and Reader's Digest put it back I don't know 100 thousand years ago but I found a copy for free at our free store and it has been the greatest thing ever it's inspired so much for me so if you ever see a copy of this book again look at it again you ever see it go ahead and pick it up because even if you don't learn every skill in the book and do things like it says it will inspire a lot in you and it certainly has for me but I originally made my first basket off of this these these instructions in this picture and or loosely I guess off of these instructions in this picture and um I followed the prep from this chart and this chart says to gather one to two year old vines in late fall to early spring boil them for three to four hours and Russ briskly rub briskly with a towel to remove the bark and then then you can call them up or whatever but when you're ready to use them soak them for 20 minutes in loop water that's what it says so boil three to four hours well I didn't look at the instructions as time and I'm thinking a couple hours and I know I've done that before and I've looked back online and some people say in hours some people say a couple hours some people say just a half an hour to kill the bugs and if you weren't trying to get all the bark off I think half an hour probably would be sufficient to kill the bugs but you're gonna have bark coming off your basket as you're weaving it and it's gonna be a lot more rugged which is fine if that's what you want what I think I ended up doing I had it in that huge aluminum stockpot it's not even a stockpot I mean that thing is giant it's like what three two and a half three foot tall it's huge I don't know if the aluminum like set the color coming off the bark like it almost acted like alum like I and I watched I tried to look it up to figure this out I don't see in here anywhere there's a color chart for dyeing I don't see honeysuckle as being used as a dye but I did find one where the berries of the honeysuckle were used as a dye and with alum as a mordant it created both a green and a brown color so I'm not sure if I having it in that water for so so so so long literally dyed my vines and the alum literally said it but I could not get that off of there like I couldn't and I can take my thumbnail and I can scrape it and it comes off but I worked on that basket for a full like 20 hours I am not kidding because every single vine I scrape and scrape and scrape trying to get it cleaned up and honestly I love it the way it is I think I told my mom like it's a difference that this guy's like not you know there's a it was made out of wild vines but they're pretty close to the house it's something I Drive by daily or you know see daily on the way to feed the dogs or whatever and that these vines came from down over the hill what we consider down over the hill and like around the campground and to me that's like just a more wild area than the outskirts of our yard and so I expected it to not want to be a perfect basket and I expected it to have some a lot more character and just wildness about it and boy did it just basically told me like it's gonna be what it wants to be and it's gonna be could be whatever color wants to be and I got some really crazy color combinations and some of this I mean it is like in the vine that color is and I think that I inadvertently dyed the vines and the alum set it and you know when I get this out of the pot after soaking it that will all come off easier but it's still it's it's a nightmare trying to get it off and what I think will end up happening with this vine I think I will soak it and use it and they'll be parts of it gets scraped off as I weave but it's gonna go to be a Vaughn like this but I mean some of that big stuff come off of the very same plants they just didn't I pulled it out earlier it didn't sit in that water all night cuz it was like 2 or 3 in the morning I was like I'm not gonna make this basket right now some of this bark just won't come off and so I let it soak all night in that water but those bigger pieces I knew I wasn't going to be using and I took it out and even some of this came from the batch of this it was just the larger vine I had left from it and I wanted to use all the larger vines so I think actually these probably lighter colored ones here they're still not white like the same kind of white and it's tan it's not why they're still not the same as that but they're obviously different and I think it's a dot I think I dyed them which is kind of cool but it is honeysuckle I started second-guessing myself and went down and looked and at the very least that largest is trumpet vine which is still honeysuckle it's just a different variety of honeysuckle but um obviously it's not flowering right now I can't see there's no berries on it there's nothing I can see but except for like the leaves because it is you know at least semi evergreen if not evergreen it it's alive still right now and they're early leaves in clusters but um I don't know I just want to tell you I fuss with this thing and fuss with this thing trying to get it my idea of perfect and it turned out that my idea wasn't the best idea and I think it turned out beautifully and it has a lot of character and to me it's just it's a different creature like it's I don't know I don't know how to describe it but I think when you're the maker and you know the vines like there were certain pieces that I knew like I knew where that piece come from I remember pulling it I remember keeping it from breaking like you you start to know what you're working with especially when you're doing it yourself and so this basket has a character that this basket doesn't have but this one was almost lying there waiting to be something it didn't want to be evasive it was just waiting for someone to see it and this one on the other hand was a doing this thing and happy with it and kind of fought me a little bit but it turned out to be beautiful so I just wanted to share that it didn't turn out perfectly like I wanted and what you end up with it might be something that's not so bright white maybe something that still has bits of that inner bark that just would not leave and it made you might accidentally dye it green this so just so you know that who knows what's gonna happen just be sure your vine you certainly don't want to just go yank and stuff and whatever it is it is because it might be poison ivy and you might really be in trouble once you've soaked your arms and that pull and vine out of that water and getting it you and gathering it so yeah no one know what you're getting or try to but I'll tell you the best way to be disappointed is to expect something to start with so don't

Channel: Treasured Chaos

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Id: r5_zhN7VPJ4

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 02 2020