Hello, friend
Our Story
Two best friends, thirty years and a lifelong love of Baltic amber.
Meet Anne & Lacy
A friendship you can hold in your hand
Amber is tree resin that hardened over millions of years. The Baltic amber we work with formed in ancient forests roughly 40 million years ago. We like to think of it as sunlight that someone saved for later.
We have spent the last thirty years doing the same thing with our friendship: saving it, polishing it and sharing it. Amber Basket is where the two come together.
Two tables, side by side
Anne and Lacy met at a Saturday craft fair in Langley, British Columbia, their folding tables squeezed side by side. Anne was stringing bead necklaces. Lacy was selling jewellery boxes she had rescued from estate sales and lovingly restored. By the end of the day they had traded a necklace for a box, and by the end of the season they were sharing a table.
A strand of butterscotch
Lacy’s grandmother left her a strand of creamy butterscotch amber beads. It was the first real Baltic amber either of them had held, and they couldn’t stop looking at it. The warmth, the lightness and the tiny bubbles caught inside made them want to learn everything they could about amber.
The first trip to the Baltic coast
With money saved from a few years of fairs, the two friends flew to Gdańsk, Poland, the heart of the Baltic amber trade. They spent ten days in small family workshops learning how amber is sorted, polished and set, and came home with a suitcase of stones and a list of people they wanted to work with for years.
A name for it
Lacy had carried the same woven willow basket to every fair since the beginning, filled with whatever they had finished that week. Customers started calling their table “the amber basket.” The name stuck, and they made it official.
Thirty years of friendship
Anne still designs every piece of jewellery at the same worn workbench. Lacy still chooses every stone by hand and finds the keepsake boxes and home pieces that fill out the shop. They still wrap every order themselves in kraft paper and twine, and they still finish each other’s sentences.
How we work
Made by Anne, chosen by Lacy
Our jewellery is made with natural Baltic amber that we buy from small workshops along the Baltic coast, many of them the same families we met on our first trip. Anne designs and finishes the jewellery. Lacy hand-selects every stone, then seeks out the music boxes, keepsake boxes and home pieces that make the shop feel like a basket worth bringing home.
Some of our home decor is made from amber-colored glass, not amber, and we always say which is which.
Shop the Basket