Teo's Craft · 泰奥手工 works with the basket-weaving families of Boxing County, Shandong — a flat, reed-filled corner of northern China where the marshes of Madahu Lake have supplied weavers with willow and rush for as long as anyone can remember. This is where every basket we sell begins.
Wantou Village (湾头村) sits on the eastern shore of Madahu Lake (马踏湖) in Boxing County, Shandong. The lake is shallow and reed-choked — perfect for growing the willow, cattail and rush that weavers here have used for generations. Walk down any lane in late autumn and you will see bundles of soaked willow drying on stone walls, and half-finished baskets resting outside doorways.
Today around 1,800 households in and around the village weave for a living, and more than 900 online shops ship from this single community — together handling over 500 million yuan of trade every year. Weaving is not a heritage display here. It is the local economy.
Teo's Craft grew out of that community. We buy from the workshops we grew up around, keep the styles that sell, and take them to buyers abroad. If you want to know exactly who made your basket, just ask — we can tell you the family and the lane.
Chat with us on WhatsAppWillow, cattail and rush — soaked, bent and woven by hand
Four rules we have never broken — not for a cheaper quote, not for a bigger order.
Willow, cattail and rush reed from the Madahu Lake marshes. No plastic core, no synthetic dye, nothing that will outlive the basket in a landfill.
We pay the workshop price the weaver asks, not the lowest price we can squeeze out. Households set their own piece rates — and we keep them.
The willow is coppiced — cut back each winter and regrown the next season. Nothing is cleared to make a basket, and everything returns to the soil.
No machine-wrapped imitation wicker, no glue hiding a broken strand, no spray-on shine. If a basket fails our hands-on check, it does not ship.
Five steps, roughly two weeks of weather, water and patience — and not a single machine.
Willow rods are cut by hand from the lake margins after the leaves drop, when the sap is down and the wood is at its most flexible. Bundles are graded by length and thickness — thin rods for the warp, thicker ones for the rim.
Dry rods are soaked in lake water or a village trough for one to three days until they bend like rope without cracking. A weaver tests them by wrapping one around a finger — if it kinks, it goes back in the water.
This is the slow part, and it is all by hand. A warp of upright rods is set into a wooden base, then weft strands are woven over and under, row by row, tightening as the walls rise. A large laundry basket is a full day's work for one experienced weaver.
The rim is bound with a thicker rod for strength, loose ends are trimmed flush, and handles or liners are fitted. Baskets are then dried slowly in the shade — never in direct sun, which would make the willow brittle.
For orders leaving China, the finished baskets are heat-treated or fumigated to the importing country's standard, then stamped with the IPPC mark and packed. This is what gets a natural-fibre shipment through customs in the EU, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand without being turned back.
Browse the full range of handwoven laundry baskets, pet beds, picnic baskets, storage and wall decor — or message us and we will send photos of what is on the workshop floor this week.
Prefer email? Write to taiaohan@gmail.com