Posted 7 years ago
ho2cultcha
(5051 items)
I found this at my favorite flea yesterday - in Alameda. It's a fairly large round box at 9" across. i love the birchbark. when you look at it closely, the attention to detail is incredible! that leads me to think that this might be Native American. What do you all think?
We used to see a lot of birch things like this-- and even entire pieces of furniture-- in the fairs we once had. But a group of people disrupted the fair too many times over a couple years (riding motorcycles through crowds, getting drunk and fighting, etc,) and the city cancelled the street fair permanently. :(
Where was that SpiritBear? My family has quite a few birchbark frames, boxes, wall boxes, etc... - from my grandmother who grew up in a Micmac community in Nova Scotia.
West Michigan. Birch grows all over the North. Not a very long-lived tree, though. 30 years is a good life for one.
they live longer than that where i'm from in NH/VT. we have some that are around 100 years old. there are about 5 different kinds though.
I am a fan of birch bark too. I have a few baskets and a round container.
I love birchbark baskets. Birch bark is used by many Native American tribes' to make their baskets. I have them from the Micmac, tribes from the Pacific Northwest Coast, and the Northeastern tribes too and also Canada. Quill boxes are made with Birch bark too. I love them all :)
there's also alot of them from Norway and Sweden. it's such a perfect material to use! when i was a kid, we had a cottage on a lake called 'Breezy Birches'. It was at the very end of a narrow peninsula which extended into the middle of a mountain lake in NH. it was surrounded by beautiful, windblown birches and had lots of birch bark used in the interior finishing too - built in the 1920s.