Kia ora, welcome back to Kiln Opening Day. I am Tane Ropata, and this week I have left the studio and driven over to the coast near Gisborne to spend a day with a weaver who has worked with harakeke, our native flax, for forty years. She is going to take me into the flax bush and show me how to harvest it properly, because there are rules about which leaves you cut and which you leave, and those rules are older than any of us. Then we go through the stripping, the scraping and the softening, which takes weeks before you weave anything at all. A kete, a basket, takes her three weeks start to finish. I thought my pots were slow. We talk about the weather, about teaching, and about students who want to skip the hard part. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.