‘Weaving willow and wine’
This photo was taken in 2018, and I posted it to my personal facebook account. Jurgen and I had gotten remote jobs with tech companies and so were able to move from Dublin to a rented house in Kenmare. It had a small garden and when my mother would come to visit, we would sit out in the evening, with a glass of wine, making baskets and talking. I didn’t have willow of my own, having nowhere to grow it. But she would come, willow soaked and ready to go, and we would work until the sun went down and it was too dark to weave, even with the citronella candles.
After a couple of years in Kenmare we began house hunting in earnest. We know we wanted a house with character, probably somewhere old, and a little bit of space. We saw a lot of places, but none that felt like home. It was Jurgen who found the listing for Cois Laoi. I was sceptical. It was pretty old, and bigger than I had considered (6-8 bedrooms depending on how you define bedroom). I agreed to go, but wasn’t expecting much. He said he knew we would buy it the minute we walked in the door, just by the look on my face. And we did.
Eventually.
Afterall, it felt like home.
We moved in the first weekend of the 2020 Covid lockdown. Any plans to get family down to help, or start work were scrapped. We had to do everything ourselves. The learning curve was LARGE. But something we can be proud of.
We planted our first willow bed the next spring.
Initially it was just to keep up my hobby, and maybe have some willow to sell. But then people started to ask about the baskets, about classes. We had always planned to work for ourselves in some capacity, but hadn’t considered basketry before now. By 2022 we had decided. We would build a willow farm.
And that’s what we’ve been doing. I do the designing, the weaving, the classes and Jurgen does the heavy lifting. He builds me jigs, store rooms and steamers. He keeps the beds in shape and the brambles at bay. Together we harvest and plant. All in all it feels like we’ve struck a good balance. We’ve also added a couple of kids, a couple of dogs, a cat and a flock of chickens. But who’s counting?
That’s where we have come from, so where do we hope to go? Someday we’d love to have the facilities to have people come and stay and learn to weave with us. The place we live is so incredibly old and picturesque I can’t imagine a better setting to sit and give a class. While we are not quite there yet, that is what we are hoping for, and maybe someday you’ll come and weave in the grass with us.
