MUSA: Blue Bread Basket
Description
We think MUSA would look divine on your dining table. This bread basket is hand woven in Kenya from hand-dyed sisal grass. Featuring a bold blue stripe against a natural, undyed base, this ethical woven basket brings a burst of Kenyan colour to mealtimes.
The Basket Room works with a Community Based Organisation in Kenya to produce these woven bread baskets. This weaving collective produces unique woven bread baskets using their own designs and colourways, so each one is unique: made once and sold once.
Making and selling baskets within the protection of a cooperative empowers these female weavers to support themselves and their families through the dry seasons, when farming fails to make ends meet. Weavers are paid a wage for each woven bread basket they produce, and can work to their own schedules. Each basket comes with a thank you card from the cooperative that made yours. Meet the weavers from this region 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.
