Handmade Hemp Backpack - Teal Stripe

A handloom hemp daypack in the fibre’s own pale colour, banded top to bottom with woven stripes in green, teal and indigo, and finished with a herringbone front pocket left plain apart from a black canvas panel. Padded webbing straps, a top grab handle, a zipped front pocket and an open pocket on each side. The stripes are gheri, the everyday handloom cloth of the Nepali hills. It is woven in narrow bands because a narrow band is what a small pit loom can carry in a single pass, and the pattern shifts every few centimetres as the weaver changes the thread. Up close it reads as busy; from across a room it settles into one calm colour. This is the bag in the range with no printed motif at all, which leaves the cloth to do the work. Hemp has grown in the Nepali hills for centuries without irrigation or pesticide. The stalk is retted, hand spun and woven on a handloom, which gives a cloth that starts out rough, softens every time you use it, and gets stronger rather than weaker when it is wet. The pale ground is the fibre in its own colour, not a bleach. Because the cloth is woven and the bag cut and sewn by hand, the stripe placement, the depth of the natural colour and the exact set of the pockets come out a little different every time. Yours will not be identical to the photograph, and that is the point. Ships worldwide from our Vancouver store with live carrier rates at checkout.

Every piece is worked individually, so colour, thickness and finish vary a little from one to the next. That variation is a feature of the craft, not a flaw.