Melon Basket

During Volney Jones’ visit to Walpole Island in 1933, Levi Sturgeon told Jones that he could show him how to make a basket that no one else on the Island made — the melon basket. He was inspired by a willow basket he had seen while living in London, Ontario. Taking the better part of a day for Levi and Winnie to complete, the melon basket was the most labor-intensive style of basket the Levi and Winnie made and their best selling style. Levi used special tools to make it: a ‘stripper’ for cutting fine strips of black ash, and a mold to shape the basket’s characteristically rounded corners.

Levi first made the handle for the basket and the rim. He bent each thick strip of hickory over his handmade mold and smoothed it with his knife. He fastened the rim perpendicular to the handle with metal pins and left it in the sun to dry. Later, he wrapped a wide strip of black ash around the rim and handle together and attached the center rib of the basket, as show in the drawings below. Levi used the mold to bend the ribs. For the remaining ribs, he shaped the ends into points and punched holes in the ends to attached them to the rim. 

At this point, Levi's wife, Winnie took over the basket making. Keeping her left leg crooked over her right knee and the basket in her lap, she moved from the far side of the basket towards her body. She wove thin, dyed strips from the outside of the basket to the interior, woven two times around each rib and cut it flush. New strips were then woven three warp pieces back under the old weave to continue the work and lock it in place. Given time, Levi mentioned that small, dyed strips would be used for the entirety of the weaving, creating a rainbow-esque pattern down the sides.  To save time, they switched to wider strips to finish the basket.

Levi commented that this type of basket could hold as much as 75 pounds. He told Jones that they had rushed to make this basket, completing it in about five hours, and it was not as good as others they had made, which usually took an entire day to make.

Sharing the Notes on the Melon Basket at Garden River, 1934

A year later, on a return trip to the Garden River community, Mrs. Lesage reminded Jones that she had asked him about the technique used to make a melon basket when she met him the previous summer. She wanted to learn how to make this type of basket because it was a popular form. With a melon basket that Mary Belanger had purchased from an older basket maker and the notes he made while watching Levi Sturgeon, Jones showed Mrs. Lesage and her daughter how to make the handle, rim, and warp splints.  He showed them how to put them together, especially the knot at the junction of the handle and rim. 

Jones noted that Mrs. Legage planned to make a melon basket for the 1934 Garden River fair.