Wounaan Hosig Di Basket Darien Rainforest Masterpiece

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Wounaan Indian Hosig Di Basket Darien Rainforest Masterpiece These are not just baskets, they are works of art created by the best artists weavers in the world, over a tremendous amount of time. We ship internationally, we group ship multiple purchases to save you money, if you have any questions, email cheetahdmr@aol.com All our handcrafted or rare collector items come with pages and pages of research, about provenance, with history of the tribes and photos as well. It takes an average of 3 months to make a tiny basket and up to 3 years to make a large one of this quality. You are buying a highly collectable Wounaan Hosig Di basket (the finest made baskets in the world) collected in the Darien Rainforest of Panama. This is a great price for this time consuming detailed masterpiece of hand woven art, the finest in fact: compare! The baskets we carry have the most minuscule and tightest weave available (baskets can even contain water) and the minute weave is valued and calculated as the knots of a silk oriental rug. We only pick the very best, as well as the most beautiful designs that can be located, in these collector baskets, the finest in the world. A Thread-like fiber material, harvested from the new shoots of the Chunga Palm, was used to create the outstanding minute weave above. We only buy the tightest, the best designs and the greatest color combinaisons, all museum quality. Silk stitch, size around: 4 x 6 x 16" around. We have a wide variety of the best quality and motifs available in Wounaan baskets. We have sold them internationally, and to museums as well, because of their perfection and high quality. The Wounaan Indians of the Darien Rainforest of Panama are the finest weavers in the world. They create a basket which weave is so minute that it can retain water: their material is the Chunga palm and other plant fibers only found in the Darien jungle and their intricate motifs depicts tropical plants and animals, fish and flowers, insects and geometric patterns and is woven with a needle and can be compared to a textile, so minuscule is the weave. According to Wounaan tradition, Hosig Di must be stitched from fine filaments of “chunga,” the palm from the black palmtree named Astrocaryum standleyanum and only the tender young emerging leaves are used.. The strong core material is “naguala,” the same small palm used for Panama hats. The colors used come from roots, berries, herbs, leaves and even black, silt-fine river mud. The distinctive bright colors are all possible with natural vegetal dyes. Weavers often raise the most commonly used vegetal dye plants in small garden plots behind their huts. But locating chunga requires forays deep into the rainforest and the trunk of the trees is covered with long sharp spines making it very difficult to harvest the young leaves which emerge on top of the trees. Like an exercise in patience, master weavers have refined the silk-stitch or rib-stitch technique, working 60-90 or more thread-fine strands of chunga per inch in an exacting and tedious, close, tight stitching, and creating treasures that appear more like the satin-stitch embroidery of an antique tapestry than the body of a basket. Indeed, many basket designs are today so complex and intertwined that keeping the stitch-by-stitch ramblings of birds, flowers and butterflies in check is a daunting task that takes a tremendous amount of time, as a result, baskets take up to 3 years to complete. Rooted in their belief that all plants and animals are related to each other, the Wounaan weavers seek the harmony of nature when transforming organic materials into baskets. Believing that the plants have spirits, the Indians attempt to capture that spirit in their art which is museum quality. Weavers conceived another technique more complex than twining—coil construction. The coil starts with a small bundle of fibers that are usually tied in a small overhand knot seen above right. The more fibers gathered into the knot, the larger and thicker would be the coil that supports the basket. Our prices are very low as we sell mostly wholesale and we go straight to the source to find these treasures, so you are getting the advantage of that saving as well as the advantage of the wholesale price without having to purchase multiples for a little while longer while we are making room. To see pictures of our collection, go to this link below and scroll down till you get to the photos, there are a few pages of pictures & text for educational purposes that we were asked to place on this site and we add more weekly whenever we find time. You will find there photos of what we collect and sell regularly and the interesting stories behind these items we search for in remote areas of the world http://tikiroom.com/tikicentral/bb/viewtopic.php?topic=14409&forum=5 and if you want to see colorful artwork to get ideas, and ways to transform houses with no flair into Carribean hideways, check this link again on the same site for fun! http://www.tikiroom.com/tikicentral/bb/viewtopic.php?topic=16503&forum=6&4