Who I Am: @surpassinggoogle Untalented Contest. I am A Basket Maker. Let Me Teach You How To Make Beautiful Baskets.

The craft of basket making is an exciting and technical one, but here on Steemit I can teach you guys for free. Back then in my small village of Nkwot Ikono,southern Nigeria, every young man that doesn't know how to make basket was seen as lazy and irresponsible. You could hear of parents telling their children to learn it and be creative like me. So, it was fun feeling like a king among your peers because of what you can do, which they can't do. Before I proceed, what is basket used for? you may ask.

##Uses Of Basket
Basket is used for carrying items that are in smaller sizes but can be packed into a container. Things like palm fruits, palm kernels, cassava tubers, yam tubers, coconut, etc. So you see, baskets are very useful to local farmers and the advantage is that baskets are light, thus if you use it,you will only have the weight of the items inside to battle.

##How To Make Basket
The raw material to use is palm fronts. So while you may look at cut palm fronts as waste, I look at it as potential beautiful baskets.

. the palm fronts are cut and sized into two major forms; the bars and the long threads. The size of the basket depends on the length of the bars. The bars must be twelve in number, with one of it branching into two on one side. The long threads are in smaller sizes and of greater lengths than the bars. They must by flexible. The strength of the basket depends on the stiffness or flexibility of the bars and threads.

.having gotten your bars and threads ready, arrange the bars in threes and each set of the threes must be perpendicular to each set and cross each other at the center, hmm good teaching.

. tie one end of a very flexible soft thread on one of the bars that is in contact to the ground, preferably the first or second from the ground. Then you are ready to make your basket. Pass the remaining long part of the thread under it and grab the upper set on a firm grip, pass it under the next set and continue like that till you come back to the spot you started. Here's the trick ** the thread must go under the first and second set of the bars from the ground and be on top of the third and fourth**.

.when you get to the point you started, put the thread under the first bar that you tied the the thread from the beginning, place it on top the next, put under the next,etc. Now, this process is what will take place till you finish the basket.
. after about 2 rounds, start twisting the sideward individual bars to separate from each other.

Note: by now the thread must have held them tight together so that the twisting will not scatter it, thus the twisting is to spread the bars from the point of the second round of the thread, not from the initial arrangement

.after this, continue to about 5 other rounds, depending on how big you want the bottom of the basket to be( the size of the bottom depends on how big or small the basket is intended to be, which also depends on the length of the bars as I said earlier). Now you need to calculate all that in your brain.

.next is the bending process.
Note: all the processes must take place simultaneously with the process of rounding the thread in the sequence I described above. So there's no stopping to twist or bend
The bending process is all about bending of the individual bars to form a desired shape for the future basket. By now the total individual bars will be 25 rounding the bottom.

. continue the process of rounding the thread till the basket have a bending shape. You now stop the bending and continue rounding the basket, now with stronger threads ( very important for the strength of the basket.

.when the bars are filled up, the basket is near completion. Cut off the short remaining bars and have a levelled end. Then ceal the edges with another flexible thread, similar to the one you used to start from the bottom.

Finished product

That's it. Any questions? Drop it at the comment.

I love you all.

I'm Asian George from Nigeria.

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