Handmade is a celebration of our contemporary lives, a living culture and not part of a mass imposed, one size fits all, consumer culture where everything looks the same and is easily boxed up. Each of our #incabag items is about people and not machines. It is about the time effort that goes into each piece of work, it is about skill of each of us, the technical ingenuity of the maker, the magic of an individual's imagination. This holiday season choose handmade.
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On Isla Taquile on Lake Titicaca, it is the men who knit. When inca children are at a very young age, their father teaches them the craft. They are eventually required to knit a hat in the traditional style with a colourful band around the head, floppy ear pieces and a white top piece that fell over to one side and which was embellished with a colourful tassel. These colours denoted their availability for marriage. The hat then is tightly knit. If he wanted to express interest in a young woman he could present her with the hat. She tested his knitting skill by filling it with water. If it leaked, she handed it back! This island has been...
Their designs are not found in books. People carry them in their minds. They also do not plan them out on paper. Instead, they weave. There are more than a hundred designs that people transmit from generation to generation. These designs represent their daily life, traditions, typical flowers, sacred animals, traditional tools, important personages, and more.
Quinoa is native to the Andes Mountains of Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. This crop has been called 41 vegetable caviar or Inca rice, and has been eaten continuously for 5,000 years by people who live on the mountains plateaus and in the valleys of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Chile. Quinua means "mother grain" in the Inca Language. The crop was a staple food of the Inca people and remains an important food crop for their descendants. Quinoa is more than just a grain (or seed, whatever). It’s a LIFESTYLE.Here are 32 ways to eat Quinoa and Succeed in Life. http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelysanders/ways-to-eat-quinoa-and-succeed-in-life
Ushcha Baltazar, a 70 year-old man, climbs up the mountains of Chimborazo twice a week so that he can sell the 20kgs of ice blocks at the Riobamba market. This ice is used in juices. It gives them the final touch embedding them with natural flavors. It is one of the most important ingredients of the procedure. He roams down the icy mountains carrying a shovel and an ice pick that he uses to carve out the mountain ice. Indeed, it is a physically demanding job. He is now the last ice merchant in the highlands. He has been doing this job for the last 15 years of his life. Unfortunately, it will be the last year. Global warming has...
