MERA | May 18, 2016


Saturday, May 28, from 11-3, will see the opening of a new museum in McDonalds Corners in Lanark Highlands to celebrate the world of basketry. Located in a 1930's stable, the Lanark Highlands Basketry Museum houses a collection of over 200 items, a basketry library, and a loft for workshops. Adjacent to the stable is a garden with plants that are used for baskets, such as sweet grass, winter wheat, willow, rushes and birch.

In addition to baskets, the collection includes a variety of other items made using basketry techniques: mats, toys, a bee skep and even a small boat, or coracle. All the exhibits are made from materials that can be found locally. After one display of Indigenous basketry, each display is focused around one kind of material: willow, cedar, birch, pine needles, cattails and rush. Another display includes the rest of the fourteen different materials.

The curator of the Lanark Highlands Basketry Museum is Ankaret Dean, who has been teaching basketry, and making and collecting baskets since 1975. She moved to the highlands in the early 1990s to raise sheep and bees on a farm in Elphin. Five years ago, she moved into the old doctor's house in the village of McDonalds Corners, and fell in love with the old stable where the doctor’s horse and carriage were housed.

Dean would like the museum to be more than a display. "I don't want visitors just to look at things. I want them to learn about the bounty of natural materials we have in our environment and to discover the pleasure of making simple baskets and useful items.” On May 28 at the Grand Opening of the museum, visitors will have an opportunity to make beads using birch bark.

The museum will be open all summer on Saturdays from 11 o'clock until 3 o'clock from May until October to coincide with the McDonalds Corners Farmers Market on the MERA Schoolhouse Grounds. Workshops will be arranged during the summer: the schedule currently includes workshops on using cedar bark during the month of June. Information on future workshops can be found on the website below.

The museum is located in McDonalds Corners on 5596 McDonalds Corners Road. Parking is very limited, and visitors are advised to park close by on the road opposite at the MERA Schoolhouse where the McDonalds Corners Farmers Market is held on Saturdays. Admission is by donation. See www.ankaretdean.ca for further information.

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