Samawati Shoulder Basket

The Samawati

Samawati is the Swahili word for blue. Not a specific blue — the word holds all of them, the way the sky holds every shade it has ever been.

This bag earns the name by using more than one. A thin edge of dark blue at the top, barely there, like the horizon just before the sky opens up. Then lighter blue through the body — open, coastal, the color the word actually makes you picture. Then at the base, a band of red, small and grounded, the one warm note in an otherwise cool palette. It shouldn't resolve as well as it does. It does.

Black leather straps. The darkness of them pulls the dark blue edge at the top into the overall logic — the bag begins and ends with something deep, and opens into light in between.

7" x 10". Shoulder carry. The kind of size that doesn't make you choose what to leave behind.

Wipe clean with a damp cloth. Keep from prolonged moisture, store somewhere dry. Each bag is unique — lighter blues in particular shift across sisal fibers in ways that make every surface slightly different from the last.

7" x 10" — Sisal and leather — Handmade in Machakos, Kenya.