If you want to create something beautiful and unique from wood, we suggest you try yourself in working with birch bark - the upper elastic birch layer of the bark, which has long been used for weaving various products. The diagram shows how to prepare the birch bark:
Birch bark with own hands
For a breadbasket, the kind of weaving that people call a "rug" is most often used. We use it to make our breadbox. This weaving is performed in this way: an even number of strips are assembled, folded, stretched, intertwined on a horizontal plane. The front side of the birch bark must be on top and this resulting surface will be the bottom inside. Below are two variants of weaving:
The edge of the product should be even and strong, since it is this part of the breadbasket that most often has damage when using the product on the farm.
The edge of direct weaving is made necessarily with the addition of a third strip or a thin willow forks for a basket, a basket. At present, craftsmen add wire made of stainless materials to the inside of the wickerwork. For practice, let's take the "rug" and decorate its edges. An additional, short (for the length of the edge), the middle strip does not allow you to disperse the extreme "squares" of the product. It passes through all the loops of the bent strips.
This method of weaving gives the product a firmness and straightness of the formed edge.
How to make a breadcrumb from birch bark:
1. Make a mat of 24 strips (twelve strips horizontally and twelve vertically) with a width of no more than twenty millimeters. When weaving such large products it is very important to check the distance between the corners diagonally at the beginning of the weave. It should be the same, otherwise after forming the edge of the product, a wavy line may appear or two corners will be higher, while the other two will be lower.
2. When all parts of our breadbasket are ready, we proceed to decorate the corners at the points between the fifth and sixth strips (ribbons) and the height of the breadbasket base to three diagonals. The edge is made in the manner indicated above.
3. The lid of the breadbasket is a lap with a height of one and a half, a maximum of two diagonals of the tapes are about a millimeter wider than the tapes for the base, the edge is made with denticles. The bread pan lid is used on the table as a dish for sliced bread.
4. Among the artisans, the ways of giving the bread and bakery luster and aroma by the way of rubbing the tapes with oil are common, but we still do not recommend this, since later mold fungus can appear in the product, and then on the bread.
5. Birch biscuit will allow your bread to remain fresh and fragrant for a long time. Bread can start to stale, but it will never be covered with mold. Few people know that birch bark also has bactericidal properties.