Page 55 - The Digital Cloth holiday issue
P. 55

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.
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