Billie Ruth Sudduth is taking her world famous baskets off the road and back into her Bakersville studio. With 27 years and hundreds of craft shows behind her, she knew it was time to do something different. So, after this summer’s Southern High- land Craft Guild show, she and her husband Doug packed up her baskets, sold the booth, and began a new phase of their lives. They plan to travel on their own schedule and spend more time with their grandchildren.

But as she approaches basket number 10,000, Billie Ruth is quick to remind, “I am just retiring from the shows, not from basket making. In fact, this will give me more time to work.”

That work began in 1983 with a basket-making class, a break from her life as a wife and as a mother of two sons, and from a stressful job as a school psychologist. With that first lesson she knew she’d found her true life’s work.

“I loved the feel of the material responding to my hands, the rhythm of the weave,” Billie Ruth remembers. “It was like I was playing music that you see, not hear.”

Just 13 years after that class, and only six years after giving up her first career to be a full time basket maker, she won an award of merit at The Smithsonian Craft Show and became the first woman named by the State of North Carolina as a “Living Treasure,” the state’s highest honor for creative excellence in the field of crafts.

Today, Billie Ruth’s baskets can be found in the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, the New York Museum of Art and Design, and in galleries and private collections around the world. So what makes her weaving so special?

Billie Ruth says it is all in the numbers, “It’s the math. I like to say I weave baskets with a brain.” She incorporates into each basket the Fibonacci Sequence that is found throughout nature, that mathematical rhythm contained in the swirl of a seashell, in the arrangement of a flower’s petals, and in the curve of a human hand. “It is such a pleasing design,” she explains, “because it comes straight from nature.”

All her baskets are hand shaped, using no molds, and dyed with colors cooked up from natural ingredients on her stove. The names she gives her finished products continue that curious mix of science and the homespun: “Mandelbrot’s Illusion” after the father of fractal geometry, “Little Miss Sunshine” a riotous yellow creation woven during last winter’s snow- storms, and in tribute to her University of Alabama alma mater, “Fibonacci 8, a.k.a. Crimson Tide.”

Billie Ruth shares her talent through teaching. Math students learn her practical application of their studies and basket-makers are shown a math-based way to improve their craft. A class at Penland School of Crafts reminded Billie Ruth of her childhood vacations near there and “the gift of these mountains.” After living all over the United States, she and Doug purchased a house with a view of the Black Mountain Range where he could pursue his interest in photography and she could weave her magic.

They found themselves in good company, as Mitchell County is home to more North Carolina Living Treasures than any other county in the state. She speaks lovingly of the creative talent surrounding her and her appreciation of living in a community of like minded people.

Billie Ruth is confident her customers, whom she considers “family,” will continue to find her and her baskets. Her studio is open by appointment. In Asheville her work is carried by the Ariel Gallery, 19 Biltmore Avenue. She will also take part, along with dozens of other artists, in the Toe River Studio Tours December 2–4 (see story on page 100).

For more information about Billie Ruth Sudduth’s baskets and to arrange a visit to her studio, visit brsbasket.com.