When Kisha Rawlinson was a girl growing up in the Low Country of South Carolina, most every woman she knew made baskets, including her mother and her mother's mother.

"Every time we'd go into Grandma's house, we'd smell sweetgrass and see piles of grass gathered around," she said. "Just about any house you went into, somebody had a basket being made."

Rawlinson, 33 and a Charlotte resident, grew up in and around Mount Pleasant, the capital of sweetgrass baskets. There along U.S. 17, even today you can still find traditional sweetgrass basket makers selling their wares, though their numbers are dwindling because of development. Her grandmother, however, would always travel "downtown," meaning Charleston, to sell family-made baskets from a spot near the courthouse. At age 82, she still goes there daily.

Now Rawlinson is joining the family business by producing her own baskets and selling them at arts festivals and online.

Sewing grass: Rawlinson doesn't remember when she first learned to make baskets, she said. "I made a few when I was young, but we were more concerned with playing. We'd sew if it was starting to get dark or if it was too hot to be outside." Weaving is not the verb they used for basket making, she said. "We say sew because it's closer to sewing. We're using a needle, not overlapping pieces." The sweetgrass basket-making tradition was passed along by the Gullah people, descendants of African slaves in southern coastal areas.

Gathering materials: A common sight at home was grass peddlers, and that's still who Rawlinson gets most of her sweetgrass from. "Men would ride up and down streets on bicycles and bring grasses strapped to their shoulders. They'd sell grass and sometimes palmetto. They had to go to the marsh areas. I've gone to get grass myself recently, and I wouldn't want to do it much. I put on boots for protection and tuck my pants in socks. I've been eaten alive." The family collected their own pine needles. "My mom would take us to the woods and we'd jump out of the car with our plastic bags to gather pine needles." Her materials also might include palmetto strips and bulrush. Although Rawlinson doesn't classify her heritage as Gullah, per se, "when I get with my family, we go back into that way of talking. Like, I'm saying palmetto to you, but we say 'may-da.' My grandma will say, instead of pine, 'I need some brown.' "

Back to roots: Rawlinson, who earned a degree in Spanish at the College of Charleston and has worked as a translator, continued to make baskets as she worked, but not often. Still, she said, "every time I picked up a basket to sew, I was happy." With her husband's blessing, Rawlinson started Sweetgrass Greetings, where she sells her and her family's baskets, as well as sweetgrass jewelry and lovely cards and photographs of baskets. "I look at it as a family business," she said. Her home has been taken over with sweetgrass, she jokes. "I've got grass everywhere, and palmetto in the freezer. My husband the other day said, 'I went looking for food and all I could see was palmetto.' "

New to Raleigh: Rawlinson has been in several craft shows in the Charlotte area and sells her baskets at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design gift shop. Her first show away from home will be next weekend at Lazy Daze in Cary. She has a stock of about 50 of her own baskets (she won't be selling her mother's or grandmother's at Lazy Daze), with more to come. She'll also be selling sweetgrass earrings and pendants, as well as her stationery line. "The jewelry is really popular, but it's time-consuming and hard to keep up with."

Thinning grass: Rawlinson still buys sweetgrass in bundles from Low Country locals, but worries about the supply. "In this particular community, this black community where the baskets are from, they don't have the greatest of means, they don't live on acres of acres of land," she said. "You're in a frenzy to gather the grass, but you have to sell baskets to afford to buy more." That was one of the reasons she came up with the idea of sweetgrass stationery. "Because grass is getting harder to get, baskets are getting more expensive," she said. "So I thought for people who want some type of memento, a card or photograph would be nice." She's even writing children's stories about her sweetgrass-infused childhood. "First it was my grandmother and mom's thing, now I'm finding ways to do it too."

ARTISAN AT A GLANCE

ARTISAN AT A GLANCE