The handmade pine needle baskets of a Golden Gate woman appear in the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.

If that isn’t impressive enough, these are talking baskets.

At least they speak to their creator, Dusty Holmes: “I don’t have a specific plan in mind when I start on a basket,” she said. “The basket sort of tells me as I work on it.”

That artistic message may whisper to her to incorporate beading, blend two different colors of needles or add stones and pendants, fabric, her own pottery or even wood carvings.

Visitors to the Naples Woman’s Club Artisan Fair Nov. 2 and 3 will see the results of her conversations with her materials; Holmes is one of the select vendors invited into the annual affair. (For details on the Artisan Fair, see the information box.)

Learning from the best

Holmes may be among its bestknown participants, having created distinctive pine needle works for 12 years. She’s advancing a skill taught her by the late Georgia Hortin, a weaver for 50 years who came to a pottery class Holmes was taking and suggested she fuse the two arts. Holmes still creates hand-built pottery, too, but the art of weaving has taken over her life.

“I can do it anytime, anywhere. I can’t do that with the pottery,” she said. “I collect my own needles so I can pick and choose what needles I use. They’re all Florida long-leaf pines, but they’re different colors in different places.”

Fresh pine needles are not a standardized material. Some dry in butterscotch hues, others in deep caramel or nearly down to a cherry tone. Holmes has her favorite hunting places, but she’s always scouting for more.

“I joke that my vehicle stops for pine trees,” Holmes said. “I always have a plastic bag in my car.”

She looks for dry needles, so living on the edges of this year’s hurricanes has not been good for needle hunting. “They’re all wet and icky,” she lamented.

Ironically, after she finds dry needles the first thing Holmes does is wet them. She needs to wash, then sort and clean them and spread them out to dry. At the side of her dining room table, a container overflows with double-fist sized bundles of clean needles ready for projects.

When Holmes wants the needles pliable for weaving, she will boil them. And with her current pace of sales, that’s a daily necessity to create up to 200 baskets per month in season.

“I cook every day, I tell my husband,” she quipped. When those baskets dry, they are shellacked, and with an occasional damp cloth dusting, are good for hundreds of years, she said. “Pine needles are very stable.”

More than baskets

Holmes’ weaving doesn’t end with baskets. Her cane, a vestige of cancer therapy that she is planning to be only temporary, has a woven pine needle grip. Among her works is a pine needle business card holder. She’s made decorative lapel pins.

One pine needle project Holmes rarely tackles, however, is a fullsize basket. The material, the time and the labor make them so costly there’s not a large market for them despite the gorgeous results. On the other hand, her 9-inch and smaller baskets fly off the shelves with prices beginning at $50 — each one unique, with an individual feature embedded or woven through it.

“I have 100 baskets right now, and that’s only enough for two shows a month,” she said of her wares. Spread out over her favored dining room table work spot are baskets that have centers of detailed wood, stones, small antique items from brooches to tokens. They may have a gossamer silk leaf attached or one of Holmes’ own pottery discs. Holmes will thread through the holes of seashells or weave a pine rim to attach to a perforated bowl or wood piece.

The knots, too, vary from a simple leaflike angle to thicker, more visible weaving in knots Holmes has devised on her own. The artificial sinew Holmes prefers is largely a natural shade, but there are pops of color on some baskets: green, blue and yellow weaving.

“I’ve learned over time that I shouldn’t do things that just please me,” she said. Holmes conceded she’s learned from using different colors how they can change the visual perception of the woven pine needles.

It is a 180-degree turn from the Detroit native’s career as an intensive care unit nurse, including 20 years in New Mexico and 10 years in Hawaii, where she had the good fortune to be stationed during her four years in the U.S. Army.

“It was tough duty, but someone had to do it,” she said with a sly grin.

“I do weave every day, and some days I’ll weave all day,” Holmes said.

Part of the one-of-a-kind inventory she makes is sold at the monthly Naples Artcrafters Fairs. The Naples Botanical Garden’s Berger Shop also carries Holmes’ baskets. That, in fact, brought the relationship with the Smithsonian.

“Someone from the Smithsonian saw them, and they called me. I thought it was a friend joking. I’m like, ‘OK, who is this really?’” Holmes recalled. “They just kept saying, ‘Ma’am, this is so-and-so from the Smithsonian.’

“After they kept repeating it, I thought, ‘Well, maybe this is serious.’”