I don't even know where to start, if someone could explain the steps to me, I'd greatly appreciate it.

The Wilton site has lots of how tos for basic cake decorating techniques.

Have a look. You will find instructions for the basket weave there.
http://www.wilton.com/decorating/basic/index.cfm

Do you have the wilton flower formers set

If so this is how I do it (I am going to try to make a cake tomorrow if I feel better, if I do I will take pictures)

Crumb coat the coat, let cake sit for a few minutes.

Put a another layer but not to heavy just a light coat of frosting.

Now take the middle size of the flower set lightly press into cake.

Two marks will be made, now take the the flower former again and this time put one edge in between those to lines and press (now you should have four lines).

continue around the cake.

Use lines to guide. From one line to next use your tip and make the first weave.

Now for me to get now even space in between each line as I go up - I take the tip and the ends of the line in made I give a light tap of frosting so when you start your next line you will be above the those taps of frosting.

I hope that makes sense.

justsweet, I would love to see your method as a tutorial, it sounds so precise.

Here's Toba Garrett's tutorial from Epicurious.com:

http://tinyurl.com/ww5wv

HTH

My instructor told us to use the tip as the spacer.

put one line down the side of your cake
l
l
l
l
then holding the tip at the top of the cake next to that line mark two slits of icing (that will be the ending point of your horizontal line)
l--
l
l

then put a horizontal line of frosting accross the original vertical line and end at the end of the 2nd spacer.
__
l--
l

right under that line at the end put a vertical spacer (looks like and upside down L) that will serve as the spacer for the vertical lines.
__
l l
l__
l l
l__
l l

i hope this didn't totally confuse you!!
Tara

sorry
i guess that's why I will never sign up to be a wilton instructor-i'm not good at explaining things

TaraRowan, I was just teasing you

You did a fine job of explaining, I just don't do it the proper way. I kind of just wing it with the lines and never knew there actually was a method to it.

I clicked on the link where Toba Garret explained it and it was the same method you described.

I really hope you were just joking and didn't take my comment to heart. You would make a FINE Wilton instructor!!!!

One more thing when planning to do basketweave: You'll need to plan to have an EVEN number of vertical stripes. If you have an odd number, you'll end up with your horizontal basket stripes not matching up on the over/under/over/under/over/under pattern. With an odd number, you'll end up with a row with over/under/over/over/... and that's not good.

An easy way to figure it out is this:
(Diameter of the cake) x Pi = circumference. (6" cake x 3.14 = 18.84")

If you know you want your basket splines about an inch apart, then you want 18 one-inch splines, but you also know you'll need to nudge 'em a bit to absorb the extra .84 inch and not have a gap.

If you want 1.5" gap between splines, just divide the 18.84 by 1.5, and you'll see you'll have 12 splines, plus an extra .56 inch to absorb.

And you thought you'd never use that high school Geometry!