Basket-Covered Pottery
CHAPTER X
BASKET-COVERED POTTERY
There has always been a close connection between pottery and basketry. Those who study Indian handicrafts learn that pottery was evolved from basketry in the long ago. Neltje Blanchan suggests that it may have happened in some such way as this: “Perhaps a hunter returned home hungry one day ... and his wife, anxious to hasten dinner for her impatient lord, coated her cooking-basket with clay that she might set it directly over the fire without danger of burning. Imagine the woman’s surprise and joy to find, on removing it from the embers after dinner, that she had a basket plus an earthenware pot!”
The two crafts have helped each other from that day to this. The Indian woman suspends her earthen cooking-jar with coils of wild grapevine, which ever and anon she smears with wet clay when the flames come too near. Japanese craftsmen enmesh their pottery jars with wistaria stems to protect them from breakage, or to suspend them against the wall, where growing plants or trailing vines may fill them to overflowing. Even the little ginger jar one buys for a few cents in Chinatown has its case and handle of pliant cane.
Charming things may be made for the beautifying of one’s own or another’s house if one knows something of the two crafts. A few of them are described in the following pages:
Indian Pottery Bowl Suspended with Raffia
Materials required: