BOAS] APPLICATION OF DESIGN TO FIELD 261 
No matter how carefully the artist may perform her task, certain 
conflicts are bound to arise between any design arrangement she 
may select and the peculiar form of the burden basket which she 
seeks to beautify. Thus she is constantly prevented from accom- 
plishing with success that which she attempts to do. We see that 
the creative instinct, at least along the lines which tradition has laid 
down, is curbed in many ways by conditions which could only be 
removed by radical changes in the shape of the basket. 
So we find here a group of artists struggling, for the most part, to 
ornament a peculiarly difficult shape with designs which are in many 
instances not capable of perfect adjustment. Even in the case of 
the more easily handled patterns, however, there are problems the 
successful solution of which would tax to the utmost the patience 
and ingenuity of the majority of white women. 
Among the general obstacles in the way of successful treatment, 
from which no woman can escape, however true may be her eye, 
however painstaking her work, however extraordinary her artistic 
sense, is the leaning stitch, a difficulty which is unsolvable except by 
a complete change of sewing methods, something not likely to occur 
in a tribe which has sewed in this manner for generations. The 
leaning stitches necessarily affect more or less all lines intended to 
be truly vertical. Secondly, there is the constantly varying width 
of the sewing splints which, minute as it is, affects the size of the 
imbricated block to no slight degree when a number of stitches are 
taken en masse. This difficulty could never be adjusted without a 
machine gauge for preparing the splints, since human handiwork 
almost never attains to mechanical accuracy. Lastly, there is the 
structure and form of the basket itself which includes several prob- 
lems. The coarse coils and stitches do not admit of direct diagonals, 
but necessitate ‘“‘steps.’”” Neither is it possible, or at least practi- 
cable, to make smaller adjustments than the size of coil and stitch 
admits, although in one rare instance we may see how the square 
block of a bird’s beak was shaved down by narrowing the ribbon 
in successive stitches (pl. 47, e). On account of the square stitches 
curved designs are eliminated altogether. 
The spiral coil necessitates a “‘jump’’ at some point on the basket 
wall at each round and therefore at that pot two adjacent figures 
lying either side of it although otherwise alike are bound to differ in 
their relative position on the basket by the distance of one coil. 
The form of the basket with its constantly increasing wall circum- 
ference in the direction of the rim and the oblique corners offer the 
last two and probably most baffling of all the problems with which 
the artist must wrestle. 
With all these difficulties to be kept in mind, we will attempt to 
discuss the remarkable ingenuity of the weavers. At the same time 
