Doris Condon Canon of Opelika knows the bonding that occurs when precious mementos are passed from one generation to another. At 84, she is creating those memories with her own hands.Her tools for making delicate-looking pine needle baskets are simply a tapestry needle, raffia, small wire rings for open work and plumbers’ pipefittings.She has created more baskets than she can remember, selling none, preferring to give them away to family, friends and as sought-after wedding gifts. Mrs. Canon loves the feel of ceramics, damp, pliable clay and the textures found in fabrics and baskets. So when she saw pine needle basketry featured in a magazine in the ’70s, the idea of pine needle baskets fascinated her. She hooked up with a friend, Mary Love Tierney, to learn the craft. Her daughter accompanied her, but after one morning of class, she turned to her mother and said, “Here mama, this is too slow for me.” Slow indeed. Some of Mrs. Canon’s baskets have 100 hours of labor in them. “One straw at a time doesn’t go very fast,” she said.Mrs. Canon gathers longleaf pine needles in the fall because they’re dry. “We don’t have a lot of long leaf pine in this area, so you just have to stop where you see them and beg for them,” she said. Beginning with a knot in a piece of pine straw at the center bottom of the basket, she circles that knot, adding one straw at a time while incorporating the straw into a tiny bundle of needles held in place by a plumber’s compression fitting. This “artist’s helper” keeps the needles straight, holding the bundle together to maintain a uniform thickness for the rows she assembles.She fastens the rows with a raffia-threaded tapestry needle in a variety of stitches, buttonhole and whip being two of her favorites. Between stitches she wraps the rows with raffia which strengthens the basket and produces a decorative and distinctive design. Some of her friends add color to theirs, but she prefers the natural contrast of the raffia to the dark pine.Pine needle basketmaking is slow work. “Young people don’t want it to take so long,” she said of the process that’s easier learned by watching than by reading. “I have one granddaughter who has learned, and I hope some of my other grandchildren and great grandchildren will want to learn.”She strays from pine needle baskets sometimes to do volunteer work at the Opelika Museum or with her church’s outreach program at the local Lee County Jail. And, she stays savvy in local happenings by attending Opelika Envision meetings. Mrs. Canon still lives in the house she and her late husband moved to in 1945. It is filled with memories of raising children, her teaching career and a childhood spent on Lake Condon near Opelika making mudpies. Her love for tactile things is evidenced by her pottery collection displayed along with her baskets and those collected from other basketmakers.”I swapped baskets one time with a Gula woman in the low country of South Carolina,” she recalled. As a young woman, Mrs. Canon started teaching home economics in Cullman County. “I married, and after awhile, I had enough home ec at home, and I went back to school and took elementary education,” she said.Mrs. Canon retired in the early ’70s after teaching fourth grade for about 20 years. “I love fourth grade children, they’re interested in anything you throw at them,” she said.After retirement and years of teaching ceramics at the local recreation center, she took up pine needle basketmaking because it looked like fun, and because she wanted something to do, “when I come in from my yardwork.”Some have described the art as a combination of basketmaking and sewing, and that certainly seems like an apt description. She wraps the rows tightly to produce a sturdy basket, saying “I do everything hard. I walk hard, I talk hard. The children tell me, ‘Mama you’re using your school teacher voice,'” she said. Legend has it that a Mrs. McAfee of Georgia made the first pine needle container during the Civil War and used it as a hat. “The lady who taught me had made a hat for herself by turning a basket on its end and adding a rim. It was once a popular craft,” Mrs. Canon noted. “We have several pieces at the museum that older people in the community have donated. One is a tray as large as a coffee table and about 100 years old. My niece found it in Birmingham, and I repaired it and donated it to the museum here in town.”Mrs. Canon’s creations will be passed from one generation to another as part of the folklife culture she learned and taught–they are lasting mementos made with loving hands.The attraction of baskets may be a primal one, for few people can encounter a basket without stopping to feel its material or test its heft. Baskets are a link connecting us to the earth and the life that flourishes there.Mary Ann Smith feels that connection, having loved baskets since she was a child. She always wanted to know how to make one. Now, as a proponent of preserving folklife culture, Mrs. Smith and her husband, Bill, use a team approach to teach the skill at Tannehill State Park in Central Alabama, where the baskets and Mrs. Smith’s hand-woven rugs are for sale in the craft demonstration area of the park.”Bill usually does the splits because it is more physical work, and I weave the baskets,” Mrs. Smith explained.The Smiths’ tools are small oak logs about 5-8 inches in diameter, a mallet, butcher knife, ax and a wedge.The sapwood is split into 5- to 8-foot strips using a butcher knife, depending on the item being made. They are scraped with a smaller knife to remove any splinters and soaked in water until pliable. The Smiths then weave the splits while still wet.Using an under-one and over-one repeat weave, it takes about a day to complete a basket, including six hours to make the splits. “Wet splits will shrink as they dry, and I will need to go back and pack down each row. If you don’t pack it down, gravity will do it for you, and it will be loose. This gives a much tighter, stronger basket,” Mrs. Smith said. “By the time I get to the top, there will be one row of space, and then I’ll add another row of weaving. Add the handle (hand carved), which is notched so it holds itself in. Add an outer rim and inner rim, lash in both directions, and we’re through.”Colors can be added by dying splits with plant materials–purply-pink from elderberries to the gold of osage orange–either gathered in the woods or special ordered from craft shops. Other decorative touches include wisteria, roots, handmade wool and small twigs or branches. “We get our trees from people who come through Tannehill and will let us cut. We trade baskets for trees,” she said.One 5-8-inch diameter tree will yield five or six baskets, depending on size and shape. Cotton baskets, egg or “fanny” baskets, berry baskets, bread baskets, trays, and fish traps, all made by the Smiths, are available at Tannehill. A fish trap is made with about 8-foot splits with small openings at the top where small fish can escape and a hole in the side where bait is placed. The inner chamber narrows to prevent larger fish from escaping. Indians adapted this idea to their lifestyle once introduced to white oak basketmaking by white settlers.”Most people assume this is an artform created by the Indians, but it actually originated in the 1800s in the Appalachians with whites,” Mrs. Smith said.Why not just buy a kit? Why go to the trouble of splitting the wood? Mrs. Smith said she started with commercial materials, but soon was going from scratch. “I like to see things through from beginning to end and in this case, it means from tree to finished basket. It’s a decorative and practical skill I am passing along to my daughter. Just a little spritzing with warm water a couple times a year and these baskets will be forever treasured for 100 years by generations to come.”Passing a folklife skill from one generation to another is a “perk” for basketmaker, Marcus Stinchcomb of Millbrook. Stinchcomb fashions stylized baskets from wisteria vines he harvests from fields, and he has taught his 16-year-old son to do the same.Stinchcomb takes the gnarly wisteria vines, in varying thicknesses from 1/2 inch to 4-5 inches in diameter, and forms them into baskets, furniture, mirrors, sculptures and anything else that strikes his fancy.He began with baskets about nine years ago as a hobby. Now, it’s his full-time occupation with word-of-mouth advertising bringing him customers.Like the ladies with split oak and pine needles, he works with material he has soaked ahead of time. He attaches handles with drywall screws, knowing the vines will stiffen and hold their place. Stinchcomb’s harvesting and fashioning tools include a chain saw, a machete for getting through undergrowth, a miter saw and a circular saw.Each small basket takes about 25 feet of wisteria as he twists and turns the vine, taking his cue from the natural form already accomplished by nature. “I can look at a basket later and tell when a piece is naturally twisted and when I did the twisting,” he said. He eyeballs the vines looking out for the gnarly effect that attracts many customers. Baskets range from $20 to about $200 for the “very large” ones.He does fences, too, starting with a “wattling” fence he built for the garden at the Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery. “It comes from the old English days and was used by farmers to confine their animals or keep them out of the garden. You drive sticks into the ground and weave crosspiece sticks back and forth, using as many or as few as you want,” Stinchcomb said.The artist said wisteria was imported from Asia for ornamental purposes and was used on antebellum porches for its beautiful vining flowers. “It never dies, you can’t kill it, and it spreads like wildfire. Everyone in the South has seen a tree or house overtaken by wisteria,” Stinchcomb said. It will even grow into your house and tear the wallboards off, and it kills the trees it captures, he added. “People call me to get it out of their yards.”Hanging among the wisteria creations at his house are merit, purchase and best-of-show awards Stinchcomb has won. He’s usually found at Montgomery’s Festival in the Park, Kentuck Arts Festival, and at Jubilee in Montgomery. He attends about 10 shows a year. He also takes special orders for furniture, baskets, Christmas trees and sculptures by phone at Marc’s Vineyard (334) 285-4046.The “fine vine artist” says, “God gives me all my materials, so the overhead is not bad in this business.” A 10-foot Christmas tree for the Arts Council led to his making of the wattling fence, and he’s currently working on an 8-foot horn of plenty. He also makes cedar tables and bent willow or “twig” furniture, getting some of his ideas from Architectural Digest magazine.As he walked under a large tree in his front yard, Stinchcomb ducked a contraption hanging there. “I string some things up to dry, and the neighbors like to drive by to check out what’s going on in the trees,” he said. “It’s a fun job.”