Page 54 - The Digital Cloth holiday issue

non-reliant. Many of these women are widows.

If you look closely some of wool thread baskets which are
made by the older ladies do have intricate tribal marks on
them, houses, walking sticks, flowers, walking man and
words. But of late those patterns have changed and also
their ideology of their own creativity with art.
I have complete design on this group and I send them
patterns and colourways regularly for our next
collection. They love the challenge and being loose and
creative which I always encourage. We are now working
on dog baskets!
They also work with banana fibre, raffia, wool, cotton

thread and from the doum palm.

They do literally everything to make a basket from dying
the sisal to the suitable colour to completion. There are
sisal harvesters (farmers) throughout Kenya and suppliers
of the sisal can be found at all market places
throughout. Some of my ladies do grow their own plants
in there Shamba but not all have their own gardens or
land to do this. It does however keep the cost down to

grow the plant and not buy the materials from the
market.

The dyes are obtained from the market too in powder
form. Traditional dying techniques using natural plants
based dyes, bark and soil are still used in the neutral
tones.

you need very strong hands to weave baskets but also the
mouth and the upper leg is used to roll the sisal into a
rope like fibres to start the

weaving. It is a very laborious
process involved in basket
weaving from picking the sisal,
decorticating it drawing out the
fibres from the plant, drying it,
dying it maybe many times and
rolling the twine and finally
weaving. They also use a knife
and scissors to cut and sometimes

a knitting needle when weaving
with wool or thread.