Dani Iglesias

When he was a lit­tle boy, Dani Igle­sias used to spend hours doing hand­i­crafts: from cross-stitch­ing bracelets to sewing and even cro­chet­ing. Orig­i­nally from the Costa Brava town of Blanes, at 12 years old, he used to mount fish­ing hooks. Each line had 250 knots, so he had to make the same knot 250 times. His wife’s fam­ily owned an es­padrille busi­ness, which was his first con­tact with nat­ural fi­bres. As the busi­ness be­came more in­dus­tri­alised, Dani chose to go in the op­po­site di­rec­tion, work­ing more and more with his hands, and bas­kets were a nat­ural con­tin­u­a­tion. He felt at ease with plant fi­bres, and soon started to make var­i­ous types of bas­kets. “I have the feel­ing I’ve made bas­kets all my life. After mas­ter­ing the art of Cata­lan bas­ket weav­ing, I’ve learnt tech­niques from Japan, Hun­gary, and other coun­tries. The trade is dis­ap­pear­ing, it’s hard to make a liv­ing and I have to do other things as well to sup­port my fam­ily. For me it’s an es­cape, when I sit down and make bas­kets I for­get every­thing. I con­sider my­self half ar­ti­san, half artist”, Dani says, while show­ing us the ob­jects he uses most in his craft.

1. Weaver’s knife. I have a great love for tools, I value them andy ap­pre­ci­ate any­thing that is made by hand.

2. Scis­sors, used for ‘pick­ing off’ or trim­ming any un­wanted ends of wil­low once the bas­ket is fin­ished. Very im­por­tant, I use them a lot.

3. Canal. A very typ­i­cal tool for weav­ing. A long, strong piece used at the end, to help every­thing stay to­gether, to round it all off.

4. Cleave. A tool, gen­er­ally wooden, used for split­ting wil­low into three or four down the length of the rod. Mine is a piece of wood, made by a friend of mine who makes bows for vi­o­lins - it’s made of box wood.

5. Prick­ler balls, now a pop­u­lar rat­tle for chil­dren, was orig­i­nally used as a foot-vol­ley ball in Thai­land and Myan­mar. It has been adopted by the Montes­sori and Wal­dorf schools as a learn­ing tool.

6. Bod­kins, a tool like a screw­driver with a pointed end, used to pierce the bas­ket, in­sert­ing a piece or mak­ing space.

7. Po­dalls. Used to cut, trim or de­branch the ma­te­ri­als used for mak­ing bas­kets.

8. Wicker. It comes from the dif­fer­ent types of wil­low (salix), and is the most com­mon ma­te­r­ial used in bas­ket­mak­ing. There are many types of plant fi­bres, but this is the most used all across Eu­rope.

9. Canes. Sci­en­tif­i­cally known as arundo donax, or giant cane, it is one of the sev­eral so-called reed species. It grows in damp soils all across our coun­try­side.

10. Chair with seat of bul­rush (wild corn­dog, Typha), a kind of reed. The rushes are har­vested and the leaves are dried for later use in chair seats. It is very com­mon in our houses, but be­com­ing less and less used.

11. Mush­room bas­ket, the most rep­re­sen­ta­tive piece in Cata­lan bas­ket­mak­ing, the most pop­u­lar and most used of all..

12. Cove. It used to be used to mea­sure every­thing - veg­eta­bles, food, coal, etc. - as not every­one had scales.

13. Cofa, A round bas­ket, used by fish­er­men to clean and store fish.

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