Handmade Hemp Tote Bag - Classic Nepal

A natural canvas tote printed with a festival scene: a tall red chariot on solid wooden wheels being hauled through a crowd, tiered pagoda roofs rising behind it, a line drawing in black with the chariot and the temples picked out in red and green, and nepal written underneath. Long handles, cut to sit on the shoulder. A chariot procession is how the Kathmandu Valley holds a festival. The towers are built fresh each year from timber and rope, sometimes several storeys tall, and then pulled through the old streets by hand, hundreds of people on the ropes, the crowd closing in behind. The great ones, Rato Machhindranath in Patan and Indra Jatra in Kathmandu, draw the whole valley out of doors for days. The drawing catches the thing itself: not a monument standing still, but a temple being moved by people. The cloth is the fibre in its own colour with no bleach, so the pale ground carries the flecks and the slight unevenness that come with a natural weave. Because the bags are cut, sewn and printed by hand, the exact placement of the print and the depth of the natural colour vary a little from one to the next. 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.