Wonderful history of willow work I truly enjoyed reading the origins and different types of willow work. Through history. I found this to be an enjoyable read. If you enjoy willow work as an art form you will love this book. I wish it had more pictures but my copy looked like several pages should have had pictures because there were blank spaces with a circle symbol and I feel it probably didn’t load properly. But even without the pictures I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I received this book from NetGalley for an honest review.

Willow Working is a historical survey and informational guide to working with willow for weaving and sculpture written by Lynn Huggins-Cooper. Due out 30th Sept 2020 from Pen & Sword, it's 176 pages and will be available in paperback format.

This is a book in the Heritage Crafts series of books which cover many subjects such as leatherworking and tanning, dyeing, fibre crafts, felting, and others which are in danger of being lost forever. This book makes a nice addition to the series and provides a surprisingly comprehensive look at forming and using willow to create containers, structural elements, and more.

The first chapters cover basketweaving from ancient times to the modern day. With such a massive timeline, the coverage is brief for each time period, but provides a lot of tantalizing glimpses to follow up later.

The following chapters include interesting information much of which was new-to-me about basketry in folklore and ritual, along with willow woven boats (!!) followed by a final chapter containing interviews with several different individual artisans and collectives. The format provides the same questions to each interviewee and it's interesting to see how they came to their craft from often disparate origins, cultures, and geographical locations but their enthusiasm and respect is shared by all of them.

The photography is sparse and mostly confined to a gallery chapter at the end of the book, but the included pictures are beautifully clear and illustrative. There are no tutorials, but there are a wealth of links provided (slanted toward readers in the UK) in the form of a solid bibliography and links section to stockists and teachers. This would make a superlative library selection for a guild or shop, as well as for the basket-weaver's home library.

This is a good, accessible, clearly written introduction to spinning and weaving.

Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Huggins explores the history of basket making, from ancient times, through the Romans and on to the Victorians in the first half of her book. The second half looks at willow working in current times, how it’s sourced, how items are created and information about the artisans still working this ancient craft. There is sadness and frustration that this heritage craft may die out as fewer people take it up and we buy most of our baskets from places like China. A fascinating look into what, hopefully, is not a dying art