Rather than patent her technique, Baker taught the women in her community how to make straw bonnets, enabling the development of a cottage industry in New England.
[3] At the age of twelve, Betsey fashioned her first bonnet from split oak straw, gathered from her father's field.
For this bonnet, Metcalf made use of a straw plaiting technique interweaving seven strands and lined with pink silk.
Using her new method, she and her sister came in time to have a profitable business, bringing in up to a dollar a day,[5] and she began to teach other local women this new technique.
[9][10] Baker was honored by the state of Rhode Island and Governor Elisha Dyer in 1858, who commissioned a portrait of her to hang in the newly-constructed Union Station, with the following inscription:[11] Resolved, That Mrs. Baker, as the first inventor in the United States of the art of plaiting, or braiding straw for ladies’ hats and bonnets, - a business which now gives employment to thousands of persons and millions of capital, - is especially entitled to honor and respect from this society, incorporated for the encouragement of domestic industry in this her native State.The governor encouraged her to write an account of her life in diary form, now under the possession of the Rhode Island Historical Society in Providence.