You Won't Find These Baskets at Cost Plus

Defining moments are extremely rare in ordinary people’s lives. Or maybe they are more common than we think, but we fail to recognize them. In any event, as I’m sure you’ve begun to suspect, I’m about to tell you about a moment when a local woman’s life changed.

No, she was not the lone survivor of a plane crash, leaving a soulless corporate job once she mended to start a global charity. Nor did she lock eyes with someone and instantly know he’d be her husband.

What she did was take a basketmaking class in San Francisco.

Emily Dvorin was “one of all those people” in the ’70s who got involved with macramé. (When was the last time you heard that word?) She made wall hangings, plant holders, covered bottles…and she was probably pretty good at it, having taken a “fiber sculpture” class for four years and getting commissioned work (“I was doing a lot of curtains”). She was also raising a family in Kentfield and running Various & Sundries, a "contemporary crafts" store in San Anselmo that she owned for 35 years. (She sold it to an employee in 2008.)

And then sometime in the '80s, she took a one-day class in kelp basketry in the basement of the old California Academy of Sciences, in Golden Gate Park. Even before she got in her car to drive home, she had decided she wanted to create more sculptural work—baskets that would not be used to hold or decorate anything but exist simply to be admired and enjoyed.

That worked out well. Today, Dvorin is a full-time artist; teaches various one-day basketry workshops in her studio in Sausalito; and exhibits her work in galleries and museums around the country.

As you can see from her booth at the Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival this weekend, she’s not interested in using traditional materials like reed and rattan. In her quest to “change what you expect of basketry,” Dvorin has gone about as far in the other direction as you can go. Using everyday materials in distinctly non-everyday ways, she weaves cable ties, carpenter’s nails, zippers, keys—even shoulder pads and Play-Doh lids discarded by her grandsons.

One colorful piece, “Frizzle Frazzle,” is made up of hair curlers and hair ties. “Pianissimo” consists of piano innards such as hammers and keys. “Too Much Is Just Enough” conveys perhaps the best sense of Dvorin’s homely virtuosity: It consists of embroidery on old fabric, painters' cloth, zippers, cable ties, buttons, with threads dangling artfully from the sides.

She’s not forsaken reed and traditional weave entirely. Her next class, Twined and Plated Basketry (Oct. 1), in which students weave round and flat reed, is her most traditional one. In Contemporary Random Weave Basketry (Oct. 15), she demonstrates how to weave yarns, plastic tubing, or cord in irregular patterns. Wacky Basketry (Nov. 5) is pretty much what it sounds like, with unusual materials and techniques. Each class costs about $55, and Dvorin supplies the materials.

But first, there’s the Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival. In addition to the work pictured here, Dvorin has about 40 pieces in this year’s show, selling for $200 to $900 each. And she’s still doing commissions.

The Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival continues today, Sept. 25, in Old Mill Park, 320 Throckmorton Ave., Mill Valley, 415.381.8090.