Handmade Hemp Backpack - Turtle

A handloom hemp daypack banded in red, green and cream, with a herringbone front pocket printed with a large sea turtle in black, its shell drawn as a field of hexagons and its flippers spotted. Padded webbing straps, a top grab handle, a zipped front pocket and an open pocket on each side. The turtle is Kurma, the form Vishnu took to sit on the floor of the ocean and hold Mount Mandara on his back while the gods and the demons churned the sea. Everything that came out of that churning, the moon, the healing herbs, the nectar of immortality, rests on the fact that something steady was underneath. That is what the turtle stands for across the Himalaya: not speed, but the patience to carry a mountain and not move. 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.