There’s so much you can eat and make from things that grow in the desert! It’s a common misconception that the desert is just a barren place full of thorns and poisonous things. But as a tour guide at the Casa Grand ruins once pointed out, it’s like living in a grocery store. I’ve done my fair share of eating desert plants, but did you know you can make a lot of things from them, too? Even if you have no experience with bushcrafting or textile arts, you can create this yucca coil basket.

I have a yucca in the front yard that I’ve hardly thought about since we moved in. Why did I decide to cut off a couple of leaves today and make a basket? It’s all a part of my writing research for the novel I’m working on. My book is a survival story set in the Arizona desert, and my main character is an ancestral crafts instructor. So I figured I’d better learn some ancestral crafts. After all, it’s a lot easier to write about something when you’ve experienced it, not just watched some YouTube videos!

This isn’t the first time I’ve done hands-on research for the writing. Obviously, my travel writing for the web is experience-based. As far as fiction goes, I’ve also had the chance to fly a plane and learned to make mud bricks!

Drop a comment if you’d like to see an instructional post on how to make mudbricks in your backyard.

So, on to why you clicked on this link: how to make a yucca fiber coil basket.

Harvest Yucca Leaves

There are a lot of ways to make a basket out of yucca leaves. I picked this one because I already knew how to make coil baskets. To date, my attempts at other types of basket weaving have not gone so well.

The first thing to do is cut a couple of yucca leaves! I took two to make this basket. It was really tiny. Like an Easter basket for a Barbie doll. If you want it to be bigger than that, you’ll need a lot more leaves. I didn’t want my yucca to be bald, so I stuck with a small project.

Be careful cutting yucca. There are sharp and some varieties have teeth on the edge of the leaves.

Scrape

You’ll need a couple of rocks for this. One should be large and flat, the other should be smaller and have a sharp edge, ideally. Scrape all the wet green stuff off the yucca leaf.

You are not pounding. I found this out the hard way. Scraping is a lot more effective. I tried rinsing out some of the green mush, and it worked OK, but it will dry just fine if you scrape it best you can.

Separate the fibers. There should be a few fibers to a strand.

Cord

Now you’ll need to create a cord out of the fibers. I was daunted by this part, thinking of Pa Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie cording straw until his hands bled by the fire all winter.

It’s not like that.

Cording was surprisingly easy, although a slow process. Basically, you have two strands of fibers. You give the bottom one a clockwise twist and then bring it counter-clockwise to the top and repeat, twisting in new strands as you get to the bottom of each.

If that makes no sense to you, try watching this video on yucca cording.

Coil

To make a coil basket, you need your cord and you also need a thicker strand to act as a base. Put your cord through a tapestry needle (or get really epic, and make a needle out of the point of the yucca leaf) and begin to wrap the thick strand with the cord.

Wrap it tightly until you have enough length to overlap in a small circle, then wrap over the overlap to secure the loop. From there, continue to wrap along the length of the thicker cord a dozen or so times, then insert the needle below the row under your current row to secure it.

Continue until you run out of cord. Now secure the end, tie off, and weave in ends.

For visual instructions, try watching this video on coil baskets.

You did it!

And that’s a wrap!

Get it? A wrap?

Anyway, I hope you have as much fun as I did making your own basket! If you’re the expert on this and have any advice on how to do this better, please leave a comment! I’m looking forward to learning more bushcraft skills as I do research for my novel. Stay tuned for more desert survival ideas!