Crafting Calm

Motivated by her search for ways to deal with past trauma and anxiety, STAR EDWARDS, owner of Wonder Weaving Basketry, taught herself to finger knit. She shared the simple four-finger art with her then-four-year-old daughter, ELLIE, who really enjoyed the activity.  

To Edwards’ surprise, she found that finger knitting and hand sewing became her own daily therapy. She expanded her mostly self-taught skills to include coiled basketry, spinning yarn, wet felting, and needle felting. Becoming quickly proficient, she opened a business in Asheville, selling her baskets and teaching the skills to children at summer camp and at a homeschool enrichment program before opening her own after-school program. 

When Hurricane Helene devastated the town and uprooted their home, Edwards and her husband, THOMAS, took a hard look at their lives. “We saw how Helene leveled the entire Asheville area and asked ourselves what if we leveled our lives,” she says. “We looked at every area of our lives from our education and careers to our social lives and our marriage, looking at what we wanted as a family and individuals from all angles. We realized that God picked us up and put us in Wilmington.” 

Last December, she re-established Wonder Weaving Basketry in Wilmington. In ten short months, she has taught the art of basketry, wet felting, hand spinning, and needle felting to over 160 new crafters ranging in age from six to eighty-nine. During classes, she shares her in-depth knowledge of the history of the art.  

“What draws me in is the idea that my great, great, great, great grand relatives were making baskets from pine needles and yarn from composted tree bark,” she says. “I think it’s important to continue these traditions, understanding the reasons they were created beyond the need for food storage and other practical purposes.” 

Star Edwards has always been drawn to the arts. As a child, she studied dance. By sixth grade she was teaching ballet, tap, jazz, lyrical, and hip hop to her peers. By senior year of high school, she was instructing dancers of all ages, including adults.  

She pursued a variety of academic endeavors including vocal performance at Berklee College of Music, dance therapy at Naropa University in Colorado and some psychology courses. 

Wonder Weaving Basketry is not Star Edwards’ first foray into business. She helped manage an entrepreneur’s music business while at Berklee; produced corporate videos as an associate producer for a marketing firm; and with only $50 and a Twitter account, launched her first company, eFlirt, an online dating consultancy featured in The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. Through her work, she interviewed thousands of singles, gaining insights that led to her book, Love @ First Click: The Ultimate Guide to Online Dating. Ultimately, Edwards chose to sunset eFlirt to focus solely on her own well-being. 

“The ancient art of basketry takes patience and practice,” Edwards says of her current business. Using 100% cotton rope and macrame cord, a small 5-inch basket requires three hours of class time. Many women come back again and again, learning different ways of combining colors and patterns from Star Edwards’ own designs and finishing the tops of their baskets with handles or knots. 

She teaches basketry to kindergarten through fifth grade students twice per month at Wild Forest Academy in Leland and to Wilmington CIRCLE homeschool community. She teaches private classes for the residents of Brunswick Forest and public classes at local businesses including The BakeShop by Three Friends Coffee and hello, love. In her passion for supporting other small businesses, every ticket includes something special from the host business.  

In September, Star Edwards will start to teach pine needle basketry using waxed thread and washed and dried long leaf pine needles from the backyard. “It will be exactly how the Indigenous people in Wilmington made them,” she says. 

 Most of Star Edwards’ students are surprised to experience the health benefits of basketry, including boosting brain cognition and improving memory. “Students leave class connected, calm, happy and relaxed from the sensory-enriched activity,” she says. 

She is currently in the final stages of developing a program for Novant Preventative Neurology, opening in September, working with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia and stroke patients and their caregivers. The inspiration for the program came from finger knitting with her grandmother, who is living with dementia and Alzheimer’s. Within ten minutes of knitting, her grandmother’s speech changed from garbled and confused to complete sentences, recalling memories with clarity and expressing emotions with ease.  

“It felt really miraculous,” she says. “I had part of my grandma back for twenty minutes.” Knowing that the speech, memory and emotion centers in her grandmother’s brain were activated by the pinching motion of her fingers, she says, “The program will be so good for the preventative health of the caregivers and great for the patients themselves.” 

Along with her mission to create meaningful community for women through creativity and handwork traditions, Star Edwards creates fun. “I love seeing eyes light up with the fascination of learning something new,” she says. “Everyone is so proud of themselves, and the glow at the end of class is so real.” 

To view more of photographer Daria Amato’s work, go to dariaphoto.com

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