The Nantucket Basket Boom Hits Its Aging Weavers

40 percent more new Nantucket friendship baskets have moved through Four Winds Craft Guild this year than last, owner John Sylvia told The New York Times. Most of the islanders who can still weave them are in their seventies, and the youngest of the three makers he represents is 75.

Jackie Wegner, a 29-year-old Chicago lawyer who vacations on Nantucket, paid $2,650 last month for an eight-inch basket and expects another $1,000 for a carved lid after six to eight months. She called it a 30th-birthday gift and a sign that “I’ve made it.”

Four Winds Is Booking Christmas Into Next Spring

The lidded purse, the island’s friendship basket, starts around $2,250 and can take six to 18 months, depending on the weaver and the size. Open-topped versions keep the older name, Nantucket lightship baskets. Vintage pieces tend to start around $4,000.

Lauren Lowe, 40, an Atlanta interior designer, also ordered at Four Winds last month and hopes her first basket, by local maker Larry Brewster, arrives by Christmas. She declined to say what she paid. “It’s so interesting to have a piece of history and craftsmanship that you get to wear as fashion,” she said.

Sylvia said vintage sales in the shop are up more than 30 percent this year. Several years ago he sold “a very unusual basket” for $35,000 under a nondisclosure agreement. On Nantucket, he implied, you do not name the buyer.

THE SHOP LEDGER THIS SUMMER

• New bags: Sales of new friendship baskets at Four Winds are up a little more than 40 percent year over year, Sylvia told the Times.
• Used bags: Vintage basket sales in the same shop are up more than 30 percent.
• The wait: A new basket can take six to 18 months, and Wegner’s eight-inch order is quoted at six to eight months before the lid work even starts.
• The bench: Sylvia said he knows of probably six or seven full-time makers on island, with only one under the age of 50.

The comparison collectors reach for is the Hermès Birkin, which now retails from $13,500 and can take six months or more. Jane Birkin, the actress named on that bag in 1984, was known for carrying a plain open wicker basket, a coincidence the Times noted. Hermès does not publish how many Birkins it makes. Nantucket’s limit is a head count of people willing to sit at a mold for a year.

The Last Bench of Full-Time Makers

Sylvia currently represents three weavers. The youngest of those three is 75. He put the island’s full-time roster at six or seven, with one under the age of 50.

Wegner’s and Lowe’s orders both go to Larry Brewster, who has been making lightship baskets since 1983 and was a founding member of the Nantucket Lightship Basket Museum. Four Winds lists his work from $2,250.

The names that still attach to a finished basket are not a secret, even if a full census is. They show up in shop lists, auction catalogs, and teaching rosters.

MAKERS STILL ON THE RECORD

• Larry Brewster: Weaving since 1983, sold through Four Winds, and a founding member of the island’s basket museum.
• Michael Kane: Began in 1969 after learning from his grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. William Reis Sr., and started selling while still in eighth grade; his shop credits him as the originator of the tight weave.
• Tim Parsons: A longtime teacher of the craft, with more than 20 years of classes on island, according to Four Winds.
• Caitlin Parsons: Listed by Four Winds as a second-generation lightship basket maker, and the founder of Nantucket Bracelets, woven in rattan on a brass cuff.
• Kathleen Myers: A weaver of about 30 years who apprenticed with Parsons and Nap Plank and now teaches the Nantucket Historical Association’s first online basket workshop.
• The wider bench: Myers’s circle, named by the association, still includes Nap Plank, Karol Lindquist, and Alan Reed, the master weaver who sold Connie Anne Harris her first bag in 1997.

An Elle Decor interview last year had Sylvia drawing a hard line between people who assemble a kit on a premade mold and basketmakers who steam their own handles and control every step. He sells both, he said then, but friendship purses in his shop come from the second group, which he put at fewer than a dozen on Nantucket. The Times figures from this month are tighter: six or seven full-time, one under 50.

A shop in that position does not need a creator’s blessing to move bags. The waitlist does the talking, and the people who actually fill it are not the ones posting the unboxings.

José Reyes Turned a Basket Into a Purse

The object those buyers are waiting on is not an old sailor’s carryall with a logo slapped on. It is a lid, a hinge, and a carved plaque on a rattan body, and that form has a name and a date.

José Formoso Reyes was born on September 15, 1902, in Santa Maria, Ilocos Sur, in the Philippines. He finished high school in Portland, Oregon, took a B.A. from Reed College, and earned an M.Ed. from Harvard, according to the Reyes developed the friendship basket file at the Nantucket Historical Association. He later headed languages and social arts at the Philippine Military Academy, served in the U.S. Army, and left the service as a captain. American citizenship followed in 1947.

That summer his mother-in-law invited the family to Nantucket. They stayed. Unable to find a teaching post, which the association attributes to discrimination, Reyes painted houses and repaired cane and rush chairs. Mitchell “Mitchy” Ray, who had inherited molds from his father, showed him how to weave a Nantucket lightship basket. A picture in Life of a basket with a cloth top pushed Reyes toward a purse. In the summer of 1948 he put a lid on the form. Charlie Sayle and his wife suggested topping it with an ivory whale or a seagull.

From then until he retired in 1978, Reyes is estimated to have made over 5,000 baskets. He died at home on Nantucket on December 24, 1980. About 5,000 of his pieces are thought to survive, and they sell for about $4,000 to $7,500 secondhand.

The name “friendship basket” is a street story the association still tells. Paul Whitten wrote of a Nantucket woman in Paris who saw another Reyes bag across the street and shouted “Nantucket!” The two women stopped, talked, and stayed friends. Other versions have a man on a transatlantic crossing start a conversation because he recognized the weave. The bag was a signal long before it was a TikTok prop.

Island historians, as Positively Filipino put it in 2014, still split Nantucket basket making into pre-Reyes and post-Reyes. The summer shopper who calls the purse a sign of arrival is buying a Filipino teacher’s workaround after the schools would not hire him.

Sailors Sold 500 a Summer From the South Shoal

Michael R. Harrison, chief curator at the Nantucket Historical Association, writes that a true Nantucket lightship basket has four traits: it is woven on a mold, the staves are rattan, the weavers are cane, and the base is solid wood. Those traits settled in the nineteenth century, as the island moved from whaling toward visitors who wanted something to take home.

Lightships, floating lighthouses, began marking Nantucket’s shoals in 1849. Thomas S. James was mate and later captain of the South Shoal Lightship from the late 1860s. Gustav Kobbé, in Century Magazine in 1891, called duty there “at its best a life of desolation, with only a few gulls or Mother Carey’s chickens for visitors.” James and others who already wove rattan ashore taught the crew. The baskets took the ship’s name.

FROM SHIP DECK TO SHOP COUNTER

1. 1849: Lightships begin to mark the shoal waters around Nantucket.
2. Late 1860s: Thomas S. James serves as mate, then captain, of the South Shoal Lightship and helps move rattan weaving onto the ship.
3. 1894: Harry Platt writes that every man aboard is an expert, and that stores on Nantucket sell about 500 of the crew’s baskets each summer.
4. 1905: No Nantucketer works the lightships after this year, Harrison writes.
5. Before 1916: The government forbids shipboard basket making, ending the extra-income craft at sea, and the work moves fully ashore.
6. Summer 1948: Reyes adds a lid and, with the Sayles, a carved ornament; the friendship purse is born.
7. December 24, 1980: Reyes dies on Nantucket, leaving an estimated 5,000 baskets behind.

Platt’s line is the oldest sales figure on the books. He wrote that for a quarter of a century the South Shoal crew had filled idle hours with “a peculiar kind of basket,” and that “about five hundred are sold by the stores in Nantucket each summer for the crew.” Harrison’s short history of Nantucket baskets is also the source for the later ban, a government order against moonlighting that pulled the craft off the ships before 1916.

Harrison told the Times the sailors of the 1850s, working what he called a side hustle, could not have predicted search spikes in 2026 for both “Nantucket lightship baskets” and “Nantucket friendship baskets.” Reyes probably could not have either. The association’s own file still treats the bag as a greeting, not a luxury allocation.

What a New Friendship Basket Costs Now

The money now sits in three piles: a living weaver’s year-long commission, a Reyes or Kane on the secondhand market, and the old factory copies that used to hang in gift shops.

Stephen Turner, fourth-generation owner of Briggs Auction in Garnet Valley, Pa., is the one who recently knocked down a Barlow basket for $1,700, fees extra. Companies like Barlow sold mass-made friendship bags for about $100 to $200 in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. They have appreciated anyway. Rafael Osona Auctions on Nantucket has sold a nest of seven Karol Lindquist swing-handle baskets for $8,050, a reminder that living makers already have an auction tail.

Connie Anne Harris, a collector and former Vogue executive, bought her first from Alan Reed in 1997 and has kept going. “The basket has a legacy and that’s one of the reasons why it’s not like any other bag in the world,” she said. Alexis Hardy Greene, 30, a Pinehurst, N.C., creator with two friendship baskets and a daughter born in April, said she is already planning to pass them on. “People who are sourcing these bags genuinely care about having something that will last a lifetime and can be passed down for generations,” she said.

Nell Diamond, 37, chief executive of Hill House Home, grew up summering on the island, got her first basket from an auction at 16, and later bought one for the birth of each of her three children. “Whenever I would carry the purses, I would always get the kind of reaction that I’m seeing on social media now, which is: ‘Oh my gosh, this is so special … where is it from? Tell me the story,’” she said.

Who Learns the Craft If the Masters Are Booked?

If the money is arriving now, the training is not arriving on the same clock. A basket that takes a year to weave is a year a 75-year-old maker is not spending with an apprentice. Sylvia’s 40 percent jump is a booking problem as much as a triumph.

The Nantucket Historical Association’s answer, announced June 18, 2026, is a first online lightship-basket workshop: pre-recorded lessons plus a kit of construction materials, taught by Kathleen Myers. The association called its Heritage Craft program the focal point of preserving at-risk arts on Nantucket, and named Myers alongside Tim Parsons, Nap Plank, Karol Lindquist, and Alan Reed. Myers, Cape Cod Life has written, spends half the year on island as a full-time weaver and runs a bed and breakfast for visiting makers, a pipeline that is still personal, slow, and small.

Caitlin Parsons is the clearest young name on a shop roster, a second-generation maker whose public-facing line is as much bracelet as purse. That is a living craft. It is not six new Brewsters.

Harrison writes that the last fifty years already grew an amateur market for component pieces, molds and parts sold to people who assemble at home. The kit class extends that amateur layer. It does not replace the six or seven full-time benches Sylvia can actually name. Four Winds has been buying and selling the island’s baskets since 1948; the Sylvia family took it over in the mid-1980s. The shop can raise prices. It cannot mint weavers.

Buyers Wear a History They Did Not Weave

Nantucket holds about 15,000 people in the off season and as many as 80,000 in summer. The bag’s new audience is largely the larger number. Wren Alaia, the Connecticut Luxury creator who has visited “for decades,” said her basket videos outperform her other posts, including a TikTok from the historical association’s Baskets, Bubbles & Bourbon fund-raiser that passed 350,000 views last month. “There is this move away from things that are heavily branded,” she said. “People are appreciative of craftsmanship, scarcity.”

There are purse baskets everywhere and that’s when it starts becoming this badge of belonging. Like, I am a legitimate Nantucket summer woman because I have one of these baskets.

Michael R. Harrison, chief curator, Nantucket Historical Association

Harris, who has been buying since 1997, is unbothered when an off-island tourist gets one. Greene, who lives in North Carolina, put the appeal in the delay itself: in the age of Amazon, she said, “the baskets mean more than something that can be easily obtained.”

The delay is not a boutique ritual. It is Larry Brewster’s calendar, Kathleen Myers’s teaching load, and a shop that can ignore a creator’s request for access because Christmas is already spoken for. Mainland observers still clock a $3,000 woven purse as a tiny costume. The weavers have a more practical problem. Each new order that social media sends to Four Winds is another six to 18 months on a bench that has almost no one under 50 left to inherit it.