290 COILED BASKETRY IN BRITISH COLUMBIA [erH. ANN. 42 
the filler. It is true that the filler most frequently occupies the right 
side, but it has occasionally been seen on the left. It would be inter- 
esting to know what the maker had to say on the subject, for only she 
could settle the question. The women are not very prone to intro- 
duce foreign elements except in the filler, and this is the considera- 
tion that influences our assumption in this case. In the second 
tier of blocks the same idea of diagonals is consistently carried out 
as in the first, namely, they lean in the first block to the left, in the 
second to the right, and in the third to the left again. It is not 
entirely fair to examine one side of a basket without simultaneously 
presenting the other three sides, since the structure is a spiral coil 
and with the addition of each new coil the entire circuit of the basket 
must be encompassed. In this way it is very easy for the artist to 
carry over from one face to another her problems and thought proc- 
esses almost mechanically, especially when there is so much to attend 
to, so that she frequently forgets to make the required changes neces- 
sary in a new situation. In the third and fourth tiers she failed to 
maintain her rhythms of direction, and it is not possible to say 
what she hadin mind, whether the left blocks show mistakes or an 
attempted change in scheme. At any rate the diagonals of the 
center blocks (not counting the fillers) do not alternate in direction 
with those on either side, although the right blocks in each tier are 
alike and the center ones are the same for the lower three rows of 
sidea. It is interesting to notice the greater length of the top row of 
blocks, due to using one coil too many, and that the artist seemed to 
think it necessary to continue with her idea and start another diago- 
nal, which spoils the effect (see pl. 49, 6). It would have been better 
had she left the last coil plain. 
With side 6 (fig. 77) the artist evidently had bad luck continually. 
It is almost impossible to reduce the diagonals to any sort of scheme. 
In the second and fourth tiers she made bad mistakes which would 
have been far less evident had she not changed the direction of the 
second diagonal. 
The woman who worked on the basket sketched in Figure 78 
evidently tried many experiments to overcome her difficulties. The 
worst of her troubles came from stripes which in some cases were 
too wide, but more often on account of additional stitches which 
were occasioned by narrower sewing splints and perhaps tighter 
sewing. ‘These little inaccuracies are very unimportant where the 
sewing is plain but make themselves felt at once as soon as each 
stitch is imbricated, since definite numbers of these affect the stepped 
designs so often used. In Figure 78 almost every stripe reveals a 
different difficulty, not least among which are the truncation of the 
triangles where the stripes are too narrow or too broad to admit of 
their proper completion. 
