Where I live, the streets are lined with long-needle Ponderosa pines. I gather what’s fallen — needles, leaves, and bits of bark — materials once destined for compost or the street sweeper’s path. When dried, their color deepens from fresh green to warm tones of honey, chestnut, and mahogany. Rehydrated, they regain their flexibility, ready to be bent, coiled, and stitched into forms that hold both history and imagination.

I pair the pine’s natural fibers with waxed linen thread, wrapping and joining these fragile, ephemeral things until they become strong. Within the coils, I often weave fragments of the natural world — shells, pinecones, antlers — connecting earth and hand in quiet conversation.

Each basket carries its own alchemy of texture and color, from mint and wheat to the deep near-black of treated or dyed pine. They are vessels made from the overlooked — art grown from what’s fallen — reminders of renewal, of the beauty in the discarded, of continuity through time.