KITAMBAA: Natural and Pink Stripe Woven Laundry Basket
Description
Bring a cheerful splash of colour to your home with the KITAMBAA’s pink on natural beige design. Choose from a bright fluro-pink or a more muted pink stripe depending on your interior!
Deep and robust enough for fireside logs and kindling yet equally suitable for use in the nursery, bathrooms and bedrooms, this large laundry basket adds serious style to any corner of the home. Skillfully hand woven by a most senior member of the women’s weaving cooperatives in the rural Eastern Region of Kenya, this bright and versatile laundry hamper is made from forty balls of Kenyan sisal grass. The stiff leaves of this indigenous plant undergo a meticulous process of harvesting, rolling and dyeing - all performed by hand - before weaving takes place. Each laundry basket takes six days to complete, whilst two artisan leather workers (known locally as ‘fundi’) work together to produce its soft leather trim and handles.
Our beautiful woven laundry baskets are a collaboration of beauty and ethical living. By bringing home any of our woven baskets you become a part of this narrative, directly supporting the weavers in becoming less dependent on self-sufficiency farming which can be perilously unpredictable.
Want to know more about the people behind the baskets? Meet the weavers here.
Material: SISAL & LEATHER
Dimensions: 41cm DIA x 41cm H
Leather used is a by-product of the food industry.
Please note, as this is a handmade product, dimensions & colour may vary from those shown in the photographs.
FAIR TRADE & 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.
