'Where can we find...good, honest baskets'

Read Aloud

We go to the shops in our great cities 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; but where can we find a basket of fine, honest intent and beautiful make?
...Let us also make baskets here in Massachusetts. The gigantic, commercial world need not stand still to observe with anxious eye our little effort; department stores need not make further combinations in abject fear of our organized Deerfield Basket Industry. We do not threaten commercial upheavals, but we sit in our Valley of Delight and make baskets; good, honest baskets for use, with such beauty as we can evolve.

Madeline Yale Wynne, "Makers of Baskets" Good Housekeeping, Vol. XXXIII, No. 5, November 1901, pp. 370-371.