The amount of work that goes into a piece like this is just amazing. Not only do you have to do the work itself, but you have to prepare the materials for this. It is not something that you can just go to Wal-Mart and buy or go to the shopping center and pick out what you need. You had to prepare all of the string. In order to prepare that string you had to go to the river at a certain time of the year, harvest that plant, make the fiber easily twinable, and then you had to twist up that twine. When you had enough of that then you were able to go on to the next step. That was getting enough of the cornhusk together to make it.

Then if you wanted to put designs in it you had to go to the different plants to get those different colors to make the colors you wanted for your design. Elderberry was one form of dye, wolf moss to get sort of a yellow color. There were things anywhere from berries to bark to the moss that I was referring to, the wolf moss. They always gave a real, real soft color. It is not something real strikingly bright like the yarn we see nowadays. They were softer and more natural.

So the amount of work that goes into something like this (cornhusk work) is enormous compared to something like this (yarn bag). For a piece like this (yarn bag) if you see the inside of this piece you can see it is done with contemporary string and the yarn you can purchase at a craft store. Then the weaving begins. So that is an amazing difference between the amount of work that went into something back then and the amount of work that goes into something now. That is why I always admire the old pieces because I think about the things the people had to go through in order to make them.