A morning in a Nyanza workshop

The workshop opens at six because by eleven the room is too warm to keep sisal supple. Four women are already sitting when we arrive, each with a coil in her lap and a bowl of soaked fibre beside her. Nobody is talking much yet. The first hour of the day is when the difficult rows get done.

A basket of this kind is built from the base outwards in a single continuous coil, bound stitch by stitch to the row beneath it. There is no frame and no mould. The shape is held entirely in the maker's hands and in her judgement about how hard to pull each stitch — a fraction too tight and the wall leans inwards, a fraction too loose and it flares and never recovers.

The dyeing happened days earlier and is its own craft. Fibre is simmered, lifted, dried in shade rather than sun so the colour does not bleach flat, and then sorted into bundles by tone. By the time it reaches the workshop floor, a maker is choosing from perhaps a dozen shades that all read as one family.

Mid-morning the room changes. The rows get easier, conversation starts, and somebody's radio comes on. This is when the patterns get decided — not from a drawing, but out loud, by describing a band to the person next to you and having her tell you whether it will work at that diameter.

By noon three baskets are finished and a fourth is two-thirds up its wall. They are set on a shelf by the door to dry properly before they are packed. Seen together the set looks inevitable, as if the shapes could not have gone any other way. That impression is the whole skill, and it took six hours and about thirty years of practice.