Primitive Basketry 5: Making watertight spruce bark containers 🧺

When nature gives you fallen spruce trees in spring/summer, it's time to make bark containers. So I put aside the project I was originally working on, harvested some juicy spruce bark and set out to find a way to make watertight (at least medium-term) containers out of it.

0:00 harvesting spruce bark and roots
3:09 folding the box
5:15 making a stabilizing frame out of a willow branch
9:56 watertighting and testing the container
11:47 outro

Willow branches were used as a reinforced frame, the stitching was done using spruce roots. When making the third and fourth version, I had found the right technique and good enough quality bark to obtain containers that were mostly watertight. I again turned to the spruce trees, this time in the form of resin, to plug up some minor holes left behind by small branches and make them fully watertight.

Dry spruce bark is stiff and brittle. On exposure to water, it becomes soft again, which is why I added the willow frame. Over the course of days, these containers would probably leak a little, but they are certainly watertight enough for many jobs, such as washing, soaking, or mixing. For the time being, I'm using them as dry storage containers, but I do have future projects in mind that will make use of their capability to hold water.