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Ideas

Well-made Baskets for the dutiful consumer

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"...no good basket made"

Madeline Yale Wynne believed "all good art, all good craft, is encouraging, inspiring. Poor art, poor work, discourages and corrupts." With regard to the state of the American basket making industry, she was particularly passionate. "We go to the shops in our great cities," she lamented, "and look in vain for a beautiful basket of modern make. We find them decked out with extraneous ribbons and paper flowers, colored with pitiful, shallow pink colors, with crude, shameless greens; fluted, ruffled, pinched in, gathered, warped out of all normal shape...where can we find a basket, of fine, honest intent and beautiful make?"¹

1. Madeline Yale Wynne, "Makers of Baskets," Good Housekeeping November 1901, pp. 369, 370