This research directly informs my contemporary flax growing and basket making practice. By tracing how flax once moved through fields, factories, and families across Amber Valley, I reconnect present day making with local histories of labour, care, and shared effort. Although I trained in flax processing and textile practice, I was conscious that many traditional techniques rely on specialist equipment, long training, and controlled conditions. If this work was to be genuinely open and participatory, it needed to be something that anyone could take part in, regardless of experience, resources, or confidence. For this reason, I developed a unique method of basket making using flax stems that focuses on bruising and softening the fibre to encourage flexibility and bend. Flax is not a typical basket making material, and working with it in this way required sustained experimentation and adaptation. The resulting technique is intentionally low tech and accessible, requiring only a pair of scissors, thread (or yarn or raffia), and a large eyed needle. These are tools commonly found in households, supermarkets, and shared community spaces. By working with familiar, easy to access materials, participants are encouraged to take skills home, share them with others, and pass them on. This supports the gradual spread of growing and making across neighbourhoods, helping the project to travel through relationships rather than through formal programmes, external funding, or top down delivery. In this way, making becomes a catalyst for connection, conversation, and mutual understanding. This approach is shaped by ideas of participation and listening drawn from socially engaged practice, including the work of Stephen Willats, who understood artworks as social models rather than isolated objects. In this tradition, the relationships formed through making are as important as the finished forms. It is also informed by Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory, which reframes the earliest human tools as containers for gathering, holding, and sharing, rather than instruments of conquest. This idea resonates strongly with the role these flax baskets play within the project. Each basket becomes a carrier for ordinary people’s stories, experiences, and care. They are used to hold gifted seeds, passed between neighbours, friends, and family members as small, precious offerings. In this way, the baskets support a growing, interconnected network of growers and makers, allowing the work to continue through trust, generosity, and mutual support. This living network reflects a mycelium like structure, in which knowledge, resources, and confidence circulate quietly between participants. It reduces reliance on ‘helicopter’ artist intervention and large budgets, and instead places value in continuity, listening, and shared responsibility. This approach echoes the collective nature of the wartime flax industry, where success depended on cooperation between regional farms, factory workers, schoolchildren, soldiers, and prisoners of war. Revisiting this history is therefore not an act of nostalgia. It is a way of developing ethical, low resource, place based creative methods for the present. The interpretation boards and this website sit within this wider practice. Together, they bring research, sensory experience, and collective making into dialogue, supporting deeper understanding between people, place, and shared history.