UPINDE: Rainbow Stripe Woven Storage Basket
Bring the colours of the rainbow to your home with UPINDE. These colourful sisal baskets make beautiful home storage and desk tidies, toy baskets and bedroom baskets - they can also be used as both small and large planters for all your favourite houseplants.
These rainbow stripe baskets are limited, 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. Where once these weavers would travel regularly to Nairobi to sell their woven baskets at markets, The Basket Room now places regular orders with them, enabling these women to work from home.
Basket production takes place primarily during the dry seasons, since most of these weavers are from farming communities who rely on farming (and rainfall) to sustain their families. To buy one of our woven baskets is to support our commitment to empowering craftswomen in Africa. You can read more about these weavers HERE.
Material: SISAL & BRANDED LEATHER TAB
Dimensions (approx):
If you need a specific size please let us know prior to placing your order.
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.
