HILALI: Pink Bread Basket
Bring some extra style to your brunch date with the HILALI bread basket, with its stunning pink stripe popping against a natural sisal base. Hand woven Kenya’s rural Coastal Region, this beautiful dining table piece is utterly unique: made once and sold once. Fill yours with freshly baked rolls, slices of morning toast, or use it as a fruit bowl or a home for your avocadoes.
HILALI was created by a skilled craftswoman working as part of a weaving cooperative in Kenya’s rural Coastal Region. This group produces one-off woven baskets to their own preferred designs, choosing their preferred patterns and colour combos. Local sisal grass is hand-stripped using wooden tools and bare feet, then hand rolled on the thighs before being dyed in boiling water.
Basket weaving is an empowering craft, bringing a vital second income to these weavers who are primarily women from farming families. With crops and livestock suffering in the dry season, basket weaving makes up the shortfall so that weavers can pay school fees and medical bills, and make essential home improvements. These craftswomen are paid a pre-agreed fee for each basket they produce, and can take their weaving work with them wherever they go. Each basket comes with a thank you card from the cooperative. You can find out more about these weavers HERE.
Material: SISAL
Dimensions: 20cm dia x 8cm h approx
Please note, as this is a handmade product, dimensions & colour may vary from those shown in the photographs.
HANDMADE IN KENYA
Our journey into sustainable style began in Kenya, and the lion’s share of our woven baskets are Kenyan-made. Whilst every region of Kenya boasts its own rich natural bounty, each cooperative we partner with offers expertise in its own unique form of basketry. Weaving, dyeing and grass-rolling techniques differ across the regions as much as basket shapes, patterns and structures. These precious crafts are woven through the generations within families - passed along continuous thread from mother to daughter - protecting and preserving an art form as old as man.
Vast and colourful, vibrant and bursting with natural beauty and style, our fair trade baskets are as eclectic as their homeland and its people. From sisal grass to doum palm, banana leaf fibres to palm leaf, each weaving cooperative works with what is locally available and only what can be sustainably sourced, to produce beautiful baskets which are 100% Kenyan made, and ethically produced. All cow hide bag tags, straps, and basket labels are made from leather sourced as a by-product of the food industry. Natural dyes come from pounded roots, bark and vegetables of the region, whilst all synthetic dyes are sustainably sourced.
From the Kamba tribe to the camel-herding Ariaal pastoralists of Northern Kenya, you can read more about the lives of the Kenyan weavers we work with - and the wonderful baskets they produce - below.
