PAKA: Leopard Print Sisal Tote Bag
A handwoven sisal tote bag featuring purrfect leopard spots against a natural base, PAKA is your go-to woven basket bag for long, carefree days: shopping trips, beach days and festival weekends. With its extendable tan leather shoulder straps, you can wear yours high or low under the arm, handheld or in the crook of your arm if preferred.
These leopard print tote bags are part of a very limited production run, produced by a small, rural Kenyan weaving group we have partnered with for over six years. Led by a most charismatic chairlady, these ladies work with exceptional care and precision, and have previously worked with us on large commissions from ethical brand LUSH, and a collaboration with Jigsaw in 2016. When they’re not working on special commissions like this, they’re working regularly for The Basket Room producing our popular woven shoppers, sisal laundry baskets and banana fibre baskets.
PAKA is part of a very special collection we have produced in collaboration with British accessories designer Hannah Harrison. You can read all about this chic collaboration, driven by a longing for colour and wanderlust, here.
Materials: SISAL, LEATHER & BRASS
Dimensions: 30cm Height
Bottom Dia - 26cm, Top Dia when Flat - 45cm
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.
