Every Basket Changes a Life!

Every basket you purchase comes with a weaver’s story and how your purchase is helping to change her life.

For gift purchases, we can include a personalized message from you to the basket recipient.

Shipping:

Baskets ship from Seattle via UPS within one day of receiving the order.

The Basket’s History:

Handcrafted baskets have been part of Rwanda’s culture for centuries. Woven from natural fibers and grasses, Rwanda’s women learn to weave these beautiful baskets at the hands of their mothers and grandmothers. Rwanda’s baskets have long been a symbol of Rwanda’s beauty, grace and creativity – but today they also symbolize the strength, resiliency and dignity of Rwanda’s women as they weave a new future for themselves and their children.

The Basket’s Purpose in Rwanda:

These intricately-woven baskets serve many functions in Rwandan society. They are used as containers for grain and food products, as packages for small gifts, as symbols for new beginnings such as a wedding or a baby christening. In times past, Rwandan women used the smallest of these baskets to exchange secret greetings or to send Rwandan proverbs to each other. Today the baskets of Rwanda hold much more than simple greetings between friends – today these baskets symbolize a fresh start for a country that is moving beyond it’s painful past – and a way out of poverty for the women that make them.

How the Baskets are Made:

Weaving these beautiful one-of-a-kind baskets is an intricate and time-consuming process that requires much attention to detail on the part of each weaver. These baskets are made from natural raw materials that grow in Rwanda – sisal fibers, sweet grass, and raffia. Dyed with either natural plant pigments, tea leaves or organic commercial dyes, these baskets represent designs that in many cases have been woven for centuries.

Sisal fibers are stripped with a machete from the Agave leaf plant, washed, dried and then dyed in a pot over an open fire and hung to dry. Once the fibers are dry, they can be wrapped around other sisal fibers or in the case of the larger bowls, over sweet grass blades, to make a coil design that can become a beautiful fruit bowl, bread basket or cathedral basket.