The Nantucket Basket Guild

“I’m going to give you homework!” warns Bob Moore as eight women huddled around mounds of canes, wood molds and almost-finished baskets guffaw at an inaudible joke. “You’re slackers,” he teases.

“Oh, Captain Bob,” Leslie Goldsmith says as she motions him over to help her with the lashing on the top of a Nantucket purse. Goldsmith is one of the original members of the Nantucket Basket Guild, which began in fall 2007 during Roland Park Country School’s evening Kaleidoscope course, Nantucket Baskets 101, and now has a dozen members.

“They all wanted to make those purses first,” says Moore, “but I wouldn’t let ‘em.” Instead, he started them with 8-inch round baskets, and added in the spring semester 102 class three nesting baskets with handles. In between, Moore went on his annual ski and basket-teaching stint to Park City, Utah, and seven women who’d been bitten by the bug continued weaving on Monday nights at Goldsmith’s home.

“Those Monday nights became sacred to me,” says Lynne Troup, who, like many in the group, enjoys other handiwork including needlework, quilting, knitting and cooking. The guild’s ranks include stay-at-home moms, community volunteers, an executive search consultant, a curator, teacher, real estate agent and retired C.P.A. All paint, draw, garden, design garments and, like the Nantucket men who originated these baskets and their current Captain Bob (whom they have dubbed “Ahab”), sail.

The conviviality of the “sailors,” as Moore calls the women, has fostered prolific output, despite the fact that making a single basket can take as long as a month. Guild members have woven more than 100 baskets using wood molds made by Moore, as well as birdhouses, tiny jewelry boxes and napkin rings, wine coolers and ice buckets, round and oval baskets of all sizes, and a sewing basket with a top that Captain Bob calls “the world’s largest purse.” So far, no baby carriages, as one member spotted on Nantucket, although nothing is out of the question for this fearless bunch who range in age from 41 to 60-something.

The art form these women practice originated in the early 1800s on a light ship marking the shoals off Nantucket. With little to occupy their time, the sailors latched onto reed and rattan, which ships brought back from the Orient, and made functional baskets to sell for pocket change. Those original Nantucket Lighthouse baskets, much less polished than today’s creations, can now fetch more than $100,000, while baskets made by Jose Reyes, who migrated from the Philippines to Nantucket and resurrected the art form in the 1950s, regularly fetch tens of thousands of dollars.

“To own a Nantucket basket is to own a piece of American history,” writes Mary Kay Nabit on the tag she has created to accompany her baskets.

Nabit and the rest of the Baltimore guild give away many of their creations as gifts— or donate them to raise money for charities. No one has sold or entered any in art shows yet. 

Captain Bob, on the other hand, has been accepted at every juried show he’s entered, including several in Park City. Retired from the military and his home inspection firm, he began making baskets in 1998 after regular visits to Nantucket, and has sold dozens of the 300 he’s made.

“I’m so proud of you girls for all you have done,” says the 73-year-old captain at the end of the evening. “See what you started?” he asks, nodding to Carol McClees, who took his class in Annapolis then recommended him to R.P.C.S. There the captain has found a home and now fosters not only the fine art of Nantucket Lighthouse basket-making but more “shoal sisters” every year.

Kaleidoscope will offer “Nantucket Baskets 101” starting July 14. To register, go to http://www.rpcs.org or call 410-323-5500, ext. 3045.