Freyja
Ulveland

How I found it

I came to basketry sideways. I’d been working in leather, exploring natural dyes and tanning, and I was struggling. Not with the making: with everything around it. I couldn’t find a way to do the tanning and the dyeing that felt responsible to the place I was living in.

So I started wondering what kind of craft would let me work more directly with the land.

Then a post came up in a Facebook group. A woman named Maryann Borch was bringing a weaver out from Eastern Europe to a farm near Edmonton to teach traditional Polish baskets. I went, and I wove my first basket. Although the instructor probably wove ninety percent of it.

What caught me wasn’t only the weaving. It was the garage: a room full of people I’d never met, all of us trying to bend willow without kinking it. A father tending an infant while the child’s mother wove her first basket.

Maryann talking about milking her cow so she could make cheese in baskets she’d woven from cattail. How you didn’t need to sterilize those baskets, only rinse them, because the cattail made a good home for the microbes to rest in between batches. Craft woven into food, into land, into an ordinary day.

That was the thing I’d been looking for.

Learning to see

After that, things moved slowly. Basketry didn’t open the way other crafts had. I couldn’t buy the materials, read a book, watch a few videos and begin. It asked for relationships: with the land, with the plants, and with the people who knew how to work with them.

It also meant becoming someone who pulls over on the side of the road to go looking for sticks in a ditch.

The first winter I went out to harvest willow, I bundled up, took a pair of pruners, and drove around for an afternoon. I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at. Everything was just sticks. I stood in a ditch beside the highway with cars going past, thought better of it, and went home.

It wasn’t until that summer, when the leaves came out, that my eyes began to learn. Leaf shapes, growth patterns, how different willows hold themselves in a landscape. Once I could see it I couldn’t unsee it: willow everywhere, in ditches, along fence lines, at the edges of fields. By the next winter I was ready.

Almost everything I’ve learned since, I learned beside other women. Alberta has a basketry community that’s been tended for decades by generous teachers, and what they passed on was technique, yes, but also something harder to name: a sense of care, and of belonging to a longer line of people who work this way.

That’s what I mean by weaving willow back into our communities. These aren’t new skills. They were practised here before, and they’re still held by people who never stopped. My part is to keep handing them along.

The materials

Every basket I weave starts with a rod I cut myself, or one cut by someone I know.

Most of it is wild. Native sand-bar willow comes out of the ditches, where it grows without anyone planning for it, and no two rods come out the same thickness or length. That unevenness is part of the pleasure: each rod is genuinely individual, and you work with the one in your hand rather than the one you ordered from a catalogue.

I grow cultivated willow as well, most of it Salix purpurea. It comes up fine and slender, it’s tougher than it looks, and it takes a tight bend without kinking. That’s what I reach for when a basket asks for something finer than a ditch rod will give me.

Two willows are traditionally used in European basketry: Salix triandra, sleek and refined, and Salix viminalis, rustic and strong. I especially love harvesting viminalis in winter, when its fuzzy tips catch the frost and bring to mind the velvet of young stag horns.

Triandra is supposed to be a poor bet on the prairies. I put some in last spring anyway, and it came through its first winter. One winter proves nothing and I’ll know more in a few years, but it’s out there in the bed, and you only ever find that out by planting it.

Willow isn’t the only thing worth cutting. Cattail leaves come in summer, while they’re still green and before they start to brown. Bulrush grows in the same wet ground, round-stemmed and pithy, softer in the hand than willow will ever be. Willow bark is stripped in summer too, when the sap is up and it peels clean. I never take more than a third of a stand.

The plants I gather grow on lands that Indigenous peoples have cared for since time immemorial, in what are now Treaty 6, Treaty 7, and Treaty 8 territories and the Métis homelands. Basketry here is far older than anything I’m part of, and those traditions are living ones. I don’t speak for that work. It isn’t the line I come from.

The line I do come from is a short one. Settlers arrived on the prairies carrying weaving knowledge from the places they’d left: willow, straw, rush, hazel. Little of it was written down here, and much of it didn’t survive the move to a different set of plants. What took root did so unevenly, pieced together from books, from neighbours, from the few baskets that were kept. That’s still going on, and it’s part of why baskets in this tradition come out a bit wilder and more rustic than their European cousins.

Teaching

Teaching has become part of my own weaving. There’s a particular moment in a workshop when someone stops watching their hands and starts working, when the basket takes over and the room goes quiet. I like being there for that.

I teach retreats and workshops around the province: craft schools and community halls, yoga studios and garden shops, a ranch near Hinton, a festival field, a heritage log house, and more than one pasture with a fire going. Since January 2025 that’s come to thirty-one workshops, from an afternoon weaving stars to two-day baskets.

This autumn brings four gatherings. In September, Baskets in the Garden in Tofield, which I help organize, and the first Weekend of Weaving at Pioneer Lodge in Red Deer, given over to the softer materials. In October, Weave and Nourish, a retreat at Folk Tree Lodge in Bragg Creek that I co-host with Roni Zaide, where we will be weaving large twisted willow baskets. And in November, back to Pioneer Lodge for a weekend of willow.

You don’t need any experience. Most people arrive having never held a willow rod, and leave with a basket they made and, if I’ve done my job, the beginnings of something they can keep going at home.

See what’s coming up →

The guild

In 2024 I helped form the Alberta Basketry Guild, and I serve on its board.

We gather to plant, to harvest, and to weave. We run workshops through the year, and each year we host Weaving Connections, the largest basket weaving retreat in the province.

Most of that work is unglamorous. Organizing, planting, making sure there’s somewhere for a new weaver to turn up and someone there to show them. But basketry knowledge lives in hands, and hands need conditions to learn in. Building those conditions here is the part that will outlast any of us.