After a string of announcements from the organizers of Milan’s Salone del Mobile that the largest annual event for the design industry would be definitely happening in April, then that it was postponed two months to June, and then that it was finally, officially, canceled for 2020, many furniture and interior designers suddenly found their busiest, highest-stress season of launches and deadlines turned upside down. Toronto-based product designer Jamie Wolfond, who made a name early in his career for his pleasing, utilitarian designs as the founder of Good Thing, chooses to see this strange period of prolonged isolation and pause as a chance for “some inward focus time, just working on some kind of iterative process and following it,” he says. “That’s something we always try to do, but it’s always cut short by a deadline.” Over a Google Hangout one recent afternoon, as he fiddled with a tangle of colorful packing straps, Wolfond got to telling us about his latest point of obsession: basket weaving (yes, you heard us right).

In a creative quarantine twist, he teamed up with Adrianus Kundert, a Rotterdam-based designer whom he befriended on Instagram, and gathered a group of friends to launch @_basketclub_. The rules of Basketclub are simple: design one basket per week, in response to a simple brief in the form of a randomly chosen emoji. Loosely addressing the first five themes (🍊, 🐈, 🥖, 🏀, 🦜), the basket-weaving creations to date are hardly of the underwater variety, mind you, with an impressive range of styles, complexity, patterns, and materials, each made by contemporary talents, including Bertjan Pot, Studio Gorm, Shijeki Fujishiro, SCMP, and others, who’ve gotten us excited about the possibilities of this overlooked, age-old craft. Seems we’re not the only ones: Now five weeks in, the group has attracted a sizable following of online fans who, too, would like to be part of the club. While initially kept to a select few in order to stay accountable and motivated enough to complete the weekly exercise, Wolfond says, the gang is opening up the prompt for crowdsourced submissions in its sixth and final week with the following theme: ✉️. So go on now, and get weaving.