To get the hang of this motion without making a whole basket: set some straight stakes on your table, put a willow rod on them and just weave over, under, over, under, slowly. It’s a small movement but, if you’re learning how to weave, it’s fundamental. The basic rhythm you learn here will influence what happens with the basket’s base, how the basket walls take shape, how close rows are spaced, and the feel of what your hands are doing as the basket takes shape.
You can see how it feels to weave all at once over, under, over, under, over when you have stakes set up and ready to be woven through. A complete basket requires you to have the spokes positioned; you don’t want your stakes tipped too much, you’ll need to bend around each upright, you’ll want to maintain the shape of your basket. All of these things can change on every pass. A sample allows you to keep your focus on what your hand is doing and feel that movement before adding the complexities of rim or base to a basket. For a sample, use some scrap pieces or any medium prepared willow, and the sample doesn’t need to be beautiful, but you will want your willow to bend and not break, and it can help to have something uniform enough in size so you have a clear sense of what you’re doing.
Set four or six stakes parallel to each other on your work surface and space them out with enough room between the rods to thread a weaver through. One hand should hold the stakes and one hand will weave over the stakes, under the stakes, over and so on. It will take more than two passes and two rods to develop a real rhythm, so use enough rods to work through a few passes with each one, or weave multiple times to keep your motion steady and continuous.
The first few passes of weaving the rhythm will feel slower and you’ll push the rod over, then pull it through underneath the next row and place it gently. Resist the temptation to pull every rod through tightly after it’s woven in place: too much pulling can bring the stakes closer and too much pulling is a bad habit to develop if you want your basket walls to be straight rather than drawn inwards. Too little pulling and you won’t get close to the stake in the prior row and you’ll have gaps in the woven surface that make it look loose. You don’t need speed for this task; you need a touch that keeps the rows close together but still doesn’t draw the whole sample in too much.
Pause your work after two or three passes and view your sample from above and see how it’s looking. The weave will have alternate over and under rows. If you see two over or two under where they shouldn’t be, don’t worry, you’ve found a reason to practice this. If you see a missed row where it doesn’t belong, unweave from where it began and start over. Keep weaving and whispering or thinking out loud the pattern if it helps you stay on track with the rhythm.
When you have a few samples with the same tension, weave another one with very strong hand pressure and a separate one with much weaker hand pressure to see the impact of each. You might start to notice differences in the tight weave that the stakes are being pulled inward and the looser weave that the stakes are open or unbalanced. Try weaving with the touch of one finger and find the spot just a few inches back where the weave feels close without drawing the stakes closer than they already are. If you try to weave the rhythm over and again inside a complete basket, you’ll have a much tougher time trying to get the tension right.
Flip your weave over and view the weave from the back and see what you can notice. Even if you don’t have perfect rhythm, it should still feel as if it makes sense over and under from both sides. Are there rods that are crooked or the gaps aren’t as even as you expected? Are there places where your weaver lifted rather than sat next to the row beneath it? You want to keep these sorts of mistakes in your mind and get better at identifying them and fixing them while you’re still working on the sample.
If this has become familiar, you can keep practicing but make one change at a time, such as a thicker weaver rod, closer stake spacing, or add another weaver to weave a second join in. Keep the weave practice simple to make the differences clearer. This exercise isn’t about a finished basket or something pretty; it’s about practicing what an over and under motion is in a sample and keeping that in mind the next time you’re weaving a complete basket because the initial rows will have been done before when you’re actually weaving.