Soft launching. More makers all summer.Soft launching with our founding makers. More arriving through the summer.
Soft launching. More makers all summer.Soft launching with our founding makers. More arriving through the summer.
The hen basket is a form usually built to carry a live bird home from market or to the broody hutch. Long-sided, deep enough for a body, narrow enough to hold under one arm. Simon has redrawn it as a handbag. The dimensions hold a phone, keys, a wallet, and the things you actually carry through a day.
It is a one-of-a-kind design, made for The Haud and not produced in the oak swill tradition elsewhere. Coppiced oak, split along the grain, cleaved thin, dressed, boiled, and woven wet. No glue. No nails.
The hen basket form has the geometry of a working object even when the working object is now a wallet and a set of keys. There is a particular pleasure in that.
Simon is the only oak swill basket maker remaining in Scotland. The craft sits on the Heritage Crafts Red List as critically endangered.
The hen basket is a form usually built to carry a live bird home from market or to the broody hutch. Long-sided, deep enough for a body, narrow enough to hold under one arm. Simon has redrawn it as a handbag. The dimensions hold a phone, keys, a wallet, and the things you actually carry through a day.
It is a one-of-a-kind design, made for The Haud and not produced in the oak swill tradition elsewhere. Coppiced oak, split along the grain, cleaved thin, dressed, boiled, and woven wet. No glue. No nails.
The hen basket form has the geometry of a working object even when the working object is now a wallet and a set of keys. There is a particular pleasure in that.
Simon is the only oak swill basket maker remaining in Scotland. The craft sits on the Heritage Crafts Red List as critically endangered.
Simon Cooper is the only oak swill basket maker left in Scotland. He works from a single room in Crieff, splitting coppiced oak with a cleaver, soaking the strips, weaving them while still wet, the same way the form has been built for four hundred years.
