Anchorage Daily News

PALMER -- Jill Choate has her own groupies.

She's not a movie star or musician, but people -- women mostly -- hunger after her baskets.

Since making her first basket in 1992 out of willow she had cut herself along a Montana river, the Trapper Creek resident has authored dozens of popular basket patterns and taught at workshops all over the country. Her work usually has an antler of some kind attached as a handle or decoration, like the Antler Porkypod basket made by a group at a recent Palmer workshop.

All but one of the nine attendees at the workshop had taken several of Choate's classes.

Three generations -- Grete Perkins of Talkeetna, her daughter, Sallie Greer of Palmer and Sallie's 17 year-old son, Hunter -- signed up to spend a rare, full day together. Billie Lopez drove up from Anchorage.

Most had met before and they carried on conversations interrupted by time and distance while weaving reeds around bases fashioned by Choate.

At the feet of the experienced basket makers sat tubs of water for soaking long spaghetti-like strips of reed, and containers holding clamps, scissors and a packing tool called a "Weave-Rite" used to tamp reed down evenly over the ribs. But mostly, weavers use their hands -- a process that leaves fingers tender and red after only an hour or two.

"Oh, you can tell I don't do this all the time," said Shirley Heintzman, holding out her red-tinged fingers for inspection. But her basket, taking shape with vanilla reed contrasting with short, dark-colored reed Choate called the "porky pine" part of the basket, was worth it.

"I like the uniqueness of (Choate's) baskets. She's a good teacher, plus there's camaraderie," said Barb Morris, a workshop attendee from Wasilla.

Although she agrees the camaraderie at workshops is great, that wasn't what hooked Choate on baskets.

She had been searching for a home-based business when her daughter was a baby, and making baskets enabled her to have it all -- a business that allowed travel to Outside workshops and supported her dog mushing/homesteading/home-schooling lifestyle.

The Trapper Creek cabin houses her only in the winter; the rest of the time, an Ozarks farm is home base as she and her family travel the Midwest and East Coast, hawking her particular brand of Alaska lore and basket expertise.

She has earned a national reputation with her antler baskets, which incorporate antlers --decorated with scrimshaw or plain -- created with interesting shapes, colors and weave.

Her work is for sale at gift shops and galleries around the state.

To hear Choate tell it, it's a real experience for Easterners to meet someone who actually uses an outhouse and kills her own meat. And she plays it up.

Her Web site links to her stories about living on the homestead and hosting a retreat in March that coincides with the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

"The further east I go, the more barbaric I am," Choate said, laughing. "When I tour, it's not just that I do these cool baskets, it's this wild woman living this crazy lifestyle -- a package deal. I have a slide show of Alaska, I tell them stories about living out (off the electric grid) and losing my dog team."

But in Alaska, a state whose population, Choate admitted, has a comparatively low interest in basket-making, her frontier woman persona is replaced with pure Jill. A hands-on teacher, she circulates among the tables of the women attending her workshop.

Hunter's basket starts to resemble a zebra, with alternating black quills and creamy reed.

"Doing these classes, it's a hoot; it's more fun for me in Alaska," Choate said.

Find Melodie Wright online at adn.com/contact/mwright or call 352-6721.

IF YOU GO...

• What: Antler Hen basket workshop with Jill Choate

• When: two sessions, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Dec. 15 and 16

• Where: Matanuska Christian School in Palmer

• Cost: $95 per session

Registration and prepayment are required. Contact the Palmer Museum of Art and History for more information: 746-7668, www.palmermuseum.org.

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