This basket and its lid are coiled from southern sweet grass (Muhlenbergia sp.). The coils are decoratively stitched at evenly-spaced intervals with purple, pink, teal, red, blue and orange thread; the thread color is uniform within each coil. A portion of a Premium Saltines cracker box (e.g. paperboard) is used as part of the start of this early to mid twentieth-century piece.
The lid's "knob" is the head and neck of a Seminole woman fashioned from palm fiber. She has green, orange and yellow beaded necklaces, black hair, and a sewn-on mouth and eyes. Seminole lidded baskets were made for tourists beginning in the 1930s and 1940s. The concept of adding a doll head to the lid is commonly attributed to Deaconess Harriet Bedell (1875-1969), an Episcopal missionary who lived among the Seminoles from 1933 to 1960 and encouraged the revival of Seminole doll making and basket weaving.
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