Let Them Eat Wedding Cake!

June brides will delight in this Wedding Cake Basket.

The works of basket maker Mary Adams represent the ingenious marriage of traditional Mohawk crafts with contemporary popular forms.…

The Wedding Cake Basket is a personal invention that layers storage compartments in the shape of exquisitely crafted tiers.

After coming into contact with Europeans in the late eighteenth century, the Algonkian and Iroquoian peoples replaced their indigenous style of basketry—stitched wood and bark, twining, and plaited matting—with the plaited wood-splint technique common to Germanic and Swedish colonists.

The sharp points of woodsplint in the Wedding Cake Basket are a variation of the "porcupine twist" or "curlicue" manipulation of the splints, recognized as "thistle weave" in the distinctive Mohawk style. Adams skillfully contrasts protruding design elements with the smooth texture of surface splints, which are interwoven with sweet grass. Since 1968 Adams has made several baskets in this style—each differing in the number of layers, but all typically requiring six weeks to complete.

Source: Lynda Roscoe Hartigan. Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C. and London: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).

Pictured: Mary Adams, born Canada 1920s, Wedding Cake Basket, 1986, woven sweet grass and ash splint, 25 1/2 x 15 3/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill Jr.