Baskets are our friends. They carry and organize things; a utilitarian object that injects design to do the ordinary with more style. Baskets bring pies to potlucks. They stow papers in offices and socks in drawers. They provide a cozy, comely home for plants in bland plastic pots. Exquisite artisan baskets definitely spark joy and live in a class by themselves. Most of the baskets in our homes are inexpensive vessels of natural materials that enhance decor while doing their job. But they are also handwoven individual works of art that can also add interest by being used to create a basket wall.
Basket walls elevate and celebrate the humble basket by grouping them together into a focal point for your room. Thrift shops are full of baskets made with a whole range of natural materials: rattan, reed, wood splints, bamboo, pine needles, vines, grasses and more. The texture of materials plus the visual interest created by shapes, weaving patterns and dyes makes curating your perfect grouping a worthy decorating challenge.
As with any wall grouping, the place to start your basket wall display is playing with placement on the floor. Play to find your happy arrangement of shapes and sizes that look good on the horizontal before you start putting nails in the wall. Speaking of nails, baskets are nice and light and can hang from very small nails, using two to keep the basket from moving and three or four if needed to keep the basket flush to the wall. Some baskets will hang from small finishing nails (in a tan color so they don’t show on the basket). Baskets with a rim may require longer nails to hang flush.
Kelly Elko’s basket wall of round baskets gains sublime visual interest from the woven colors. Staying with one shape and working with a range of sizes adds to the eye appeal. Her baskets are all new. We would hesitate before we would use a vintage African or Native American woven basket in this way as over time hanging plus humidity and its opposite, a winter of furnace heating, could lead to damage.
Lisa Leonard uses a mirror as the focal point of her entry way basket wall. She adds plants for texture and visual interest and includes a trivet that makes it possible to overlap elements.
Photo by Jessica Orlowicz from theeverygirl.com
Faced with bland military housing, Leigh Fager’s basket wall is the perfect antidote. Both of the prior displays spaced the baskets apart. Ms. Fager’s baskets touch and ramble horizontally. Her variety of shapes including a very nice mix of basket depths gets even more appeal with the addition of plants.
This basket wall featured on Honestly WTF celebrates the utilitarian basket. The beauty is in the aging on the baskets (a month or two in your yard weathering can make your baskets patina perfect), the blend of materials and weaves and the tight spacing that makes read as a single piece overall.
Finally, there’s this best of both worlds installation by Lita Lee. Baskets anchor a wall display by providing the central structure other pieces work around. It’s a traditional layout style made bohemian with eclectic textural elements.
Cleaning baskets before you hang them
Your baskets can be cleaned with the brush attachment on your vacuum, with a microfiber cloth dampened with water with a few drops of dish liquid (Dawn is always our degreaser of choice), or they can be hosed outside with a fine sprayer and dried in the sun. H2O caution: baskets with dyed fibers may run when using water.
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