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Friday, 26 February 2010

8 GREAT spots to buy handmade in the Cape

Imiso ceramics

Imiso ceramics

Nothing has quite the appeal of handmade when it comes to gifts and extraordinary products for around your home. Particularly as these days, handmade no longer means  your aunt produced it in wool that she had lying around the house. Nowadays, handmade comes very closely associated with terms like ‘green’, ‘ethical’ and ’sophisticated’, and one is surrounded by slogans that include ‘the handmade pledge!’ and ‘I buy handmade’ and indeed, there are now so many different unique gifts and products in the craft world that handmade has taken on a life of its own.

In the Cape, craft shopping for handmade is BIG. There are shops crawling out of the woodwork, many of them boutique-style, upmarket showcases of the diversity, fun and creativity of craft producers in this country, with vibey, sophisticated names that prepare you for select craft objects, rather than the sympathy products that used to pass as handmade craft. Continued

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Article by: Cape Town Editor
Wednesday, 3 September 2008

Cape Town Street Crafts

Street Crafts

Street Crafts

Anyone who travels round the streets of the Mother City cannot fail to be moved by either the extreme beauty or the dire poverty that makes up much of Cape Town life. Each journey can be an emotional roller-coaster ride – joy, sadness, enchantment, anger, hope. But for me one of the most powerful and recurring themes has been an absolute respect and admiration for the extraordinary craftsmanship and dazzling inventiveness of the street artists that ply their bead work, paintings and metal sculptures around a number of major intersection across town.

Wow! These guys are good, transforming all manner of bits of recycled plastic and tin into wonderfully imaginative gifts, recreating everything, from penguins to Harley Davidson’s, lamp shades to flying pigs in elaborate vibrant bead work, or painting lively and cheeky slices of township life onto the back of old cupboard doors, adding rows of tiny 3D shacks made from tin cans. Two particular favourites of mine are the funky chickens made out of plastic bags, and the ingenious wind mills made from old aerosol cans. Continued

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Article by: SA Travel News Editor
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