About Our Family
Michael Marie (left) and Cory (right) live in Dexter, Michigan. We are slowly transitioning several acres of monoculture turf around our home to something we hope will one day be more beneficial to our own lives, our community, and our surrounding ecosystem. We are deepening our relationship to the more-than-human world during this process and will be lifelong learners of how to integrate more place-based practices into our lifestyle. In the meantime, we have extra plants and handwoven baskets to share from our efforts!
Michael’s Discovery of Basket Weaving
Michael stumbled upon wicker basketry while touring green burial cemeteries with a family member preplanning their eventual funeral. She saw a photo of a willow casket at one of the cemeteries they visited together, and suddenly found herself strongly pulled to learn to weave one of these gorgeous baskets for her loved one. What followed was a bit of a quirky mutli-year journey involving a forever growing collection of out-of-print text books, long road trips for rather hard-to-find in-person learning opportunities, and finally an amazing apprenticeship with an established funerary artisan. She gathered her family in the Autumn of 2023 to collectively weave the casket that began this basketry journey. It is being utilized as a rather gorgeous but eccentric bookshelf until it’s time to return to the soil. Weaving this basket as a family really emphasized how this craft can be used as a powerful to tool to begin to process grief and the challenging subject matter of death and dying. She now weaves caskets, burial trays, and urns for the wider Michigan community and welcomes the opportunity to help individuals weave their own threshold vessels, including alongside their own loved ones (no weaving experience required!).
Michael’s affection for all plants in the willow family has grown the more she’s planted, tended, woven, and learned, and it very much mirrors the love she feels for the family member that first inspired this journey. Michael will be growing, tending, weaving, and learning with this plant for the rest of her life and is eager to share her love of this plant and this ancient place-based craft with her wider community.