The Respair Basket

During the last year, my creative pursuits in the kitchen and the studio provided me with a way to keep my hands and mind busy, to make new things while the world felt so shaky around me. It was my respite, a moment to immerse myself in a creative pursuit and temporarily feel as though I had some degree of control over the materials in my hands.

I tried new things, revisited old things, and searched for a purpose. Often, that time was spent stitching up baskets in the studio. I settled in at the sewing machine, listening to classical music, drinking a cup of hot tea, and dreaming up new ideas. Most of those moments were spent with Penny Lane napping at my feet. My little sewing nook was often my shelter from the world’s storm.

One of the projects I held in my hands was a basket of a new and different shape, something to mark this time in our lives. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to make, but I knew that I needed it to seem fitting in a way that gave nod to the struggle but left me feeling hopeful about what was yet to come.

I sat down at the sewing machine and started stitching, not having any sort of idea of where it would take me. Without any planning, a round basket started to come together. As I began to form the sides of the basket, I decided to vary the tension as I stitched, wondering how the profile of the resulting basket might be shaped by doing so.

I failed the first few times. I made baskets with too little shape more than once. On a few attempts, it had too much shape and looked out of balance. I spent a lot of quality time “unsewing” with my seam ripper trying to get it just right.  The blend of tension I was aiming for seemed like it might elude me for good.

One day, as I removed my errant stitching in order to try again, I realized just how well suited this piece was for this time in our lives. It is formed with pressure, by the increasing and decreasing of tension. The result is a shape that yields to the pressure without breaking.

As I repeated the shape, making another and then another, I searched for a name for this basket. I researched historical basket shapes, pottery shapes, all in search of a name with meaning. I wanted something unique, something that did indeed tie this creation to this moment. The more I searched for a name, the further I felt from the right one. Nothing seemed to fit.

Last fall I came across a word that I have been holding tightly to it ever since. “Respair” is an old-fashioned word that means, “fresh hope and recovery from despair”. It feels well suited to this current moment in my life, in our lives, as we try to process the last year and emerge safely into something better.

Suddenly, the basket made beautiful and sturdy by the increasing and decreasing of tension had a name. The Respair Basket was born. It had taken me a long time to arrive at my destination, but the basket, its shape, the meaning behind it, and the name had all fallen into place precisely where I needed them to be. More importantly, the process of creating it had given me that purpose I had been searching for.

It is my hope that these baskets will serve as a reminder of the tension and pressure we endured during the last year in equal measure with the hope and recovery that we need.  As a way to share that hope, we’ll be donating 10% of the sale price for each Respair Basket to charity. We’ll even let you choose the charity to receive your basket’s donation. We’re starting off with a few charities and will add more as we move through the year.

It’s probably no surprise that one of those charities is the shelter that rescued Penny Lane and made it possible for her to become a part of our family.  I can’t imagine our lives without her and count myself lucky every day that The Animal Welfare Society rescued her and safely brought her to New England so that she might find her way into our lives.

While I am counting myself thank you, I also want to express my gratitude to you, Dear Reader. Thank you for being here over the last year. Thank you for giving me the inspiration I needed to keep creating and sharing with all of you. It has been such a gift for which I will always be grateful.

You can take a closer look at our Respair Baskets by visiting The 1840 Farm Mercantile Shop.

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