by Claire Stuart

“I grew up doing needlework—sewing, needlepoint, crewel embroidery,” says basketmaker Anne Bowers. “I was always doing crafts.”

Bowers has lived in the Panhandle all of her life, growing up in Shepherdstown, and later living in Martinsburg, then moving back to Jefferson County when she married.

Her airy studio in her old farmhouse in Middleway is filled with basketry material and baskets in all sizes, shapes, and colors. Some have the expected shapes of Easter baskets and market baskets, while others are intricately fashioned in the shape of seashells. Tiny, delicate baskets are nearly as small as thimbles.

Bowers’ initiation to basketry came about 28 years ago when she worked in a Shepherdstown shop called The Needle Shop, and the owner decided to put in basketry supplies.

“I didn’t think they would sell,” Bowers recalled, “because I didn’t like the feel of the material on my hands. Then I made my first basket, and I loved it!”

She became interested in baskets, and started reading about their history. Her employer paid for her first basketry class, and she has occasionally taken some one-day classes but is primarily self-taught. She never apprenticed, and she is glad, she says, because “I was given the opportunity to create my own style.”

In her artist’s statement, Bowers says, “Baskets have the ability to bridge the gap between a beautiful work of art and the functional woven vessel.”

Bowers began as a production basketmaker, making and selling baskets. She started teaching basketry in the 1990s at the request of people she met at craft shows. Eventually she transitioned into teaching full-time. She also sells a few basketry tools and writes patterns on how to make specific kinds of baskets.

Currently Bowers makes baskets only for exhibits and the Over The Mountain Studio Tour—probably a few hundred baskets a year. “I keep maybe one basket a year that I make,” she said. “There are not many that I feel strongly about.”

She used to do primarily functional baskets, working with all-natural material and no dyes. Now she finds it more rewarding to work with color and varieties of shapes. “I love to do artsy stuff,” she said.

Most basketry material is called reed, a rattan in the palm family, Bowers explained. However, she also enjoys gathering natural local material, including sedge, cedar bark, willow, and honeysuckle, as well as daylily and iris leaves. She likes to weave periwinkle stems into very fine baskets because the stems are consistent in size and dry to an attractive green.

“Basketmakers use all sorts of materials,” she said. She has used philodendron sheaths, sea grass, coconut palm fiber, raffia, and even shredded watercolor paper. She exhibited a basket someone else had made out of sea kelp with its little balloon-like bladders and an African-made basket woven of telephone wire.

Bowers loves to work with found material like antlers, bones, shells, bottles, and pumpkin stems, and she weaves them into her baskets. She adds whimsy to some baskets by weaving in kitchen utensils. She displayed baskets made with an egg beater, a rolling pin and a strainer. A basket with a funnel top made a unique birdhouse.

Teaching takes Bowers up and down the East Coast, from New York to the Carolinas and as far west as Michigan and Missouri.

She explained that basketry has become more organized over the last 20 years or so, and there are many state basketmakers’ guilds. They hold conventions attended by hundreds of people and offer four- and five-day classes.

“People who take basketry classes are tired of the throw-away society,” she says. “They want to have a connection to things made by hand. They love to make a functional thing with their own hands.”

Once a year, Bowers goes to Winterthur, the old DuPont family estate in Delaware now connected with the University of Delaware, where she works with a teacher of object conservation.

There she lectures and demonstrates the basket construction, including tension, dyes, and materials. “We look at historic baskets in the collection and some currently under conservation,” she said, “and we give students the opportunity to actually make a little something themselves,” she said.

She describes her work at Winterthur as, “one of the most rewarding things I do all year long. The conservation students look at what I’m sharing from a different perspective than my regular students. My regular students are interested in the baskets they are going to make. Conservator students are interested in details about the types of materials, construction methods, and history.”

Bowers’ work has appeared in juried shows, galleries, and exhibits across the East and has won many awards. Last year she was featured in Basket Bits magazine, with one of her baskets on the cover. This February, she taught classes on the first-ever “Basketry Cruise” on a Carnival Cruise to the Caribbean.

Says Bowers, “There’s lots of joy in basket making.”