Pasta la feasta, baby: Grasping at straws and underwater basket-weaving

» CunningVixen - Grasping at straws and underwater basket-weaving

I was impressed enough by this post to say, "Hmmm. Can, in fact, wheat/oat/barley straw be made into baskets? Can maize stems?" Based on the supplies available at the following web site, and related basketry links:
1. Wheat-type grass is not suitable for basket making, being overly brittle. It is not provided as a basket-making material but rather for decorative woven items.
2. Maize stems are not necessarily favored as basket-weaving material either. I don't know why, but they're not on the basket-weaving web sites, either, and practically everything else you could make a basket out of IS, including pine needles, vines, and several varietes of something called "seagrass".

Site: http://www.gratiotlakebasketry.com

Anyhoo, there's certainly room in our imaginations for whatever we want to imagine lembas to be like based on Tolkien's vague and idealistic descriptions, especially considering that he doesn't seem to have spent a lot of time basket-weaving either. While I pictured the FLAVOR as being wheat-like, I pictured the PLANT as being like one of the very early and primitive cultivated maize varietes, about what it looked like in 4000 BC.

-- posted by CunningVixen