Carlos speaking :

We were on a trip with a Westfalia from Chile to Mexico. The first time I saw these was in Uruguay. The guy that was making them at the time didn’t want to teach me how to do it. The truth is that we were a little bit bored because we didn’t have much to do on the trip. So we thought that learning to make these would be a good opportunity to be entertained and with the quantity of palm trees in the area, it was a cheap activity; we didn’t have to invest in material at all.

Being in the North of Brazil, a guy that was on the beach was making them and he taught me. This was the first one. At first, he made it for me to learn how to do it and once it was finished, I took it with me. When I arrived to my car, that was my house, I unmade it remade it again to make sure that I had learned it well.
    
This was the first one. We made a lot. We had made something like 300, big, small, some others smaller than this one. And after making baskets, we learned to make hats also, which is the same technique but the final form in different. After the hats, we learned to make lamps, which was another evolution of the basket.

This is the last and only that I kept from the 500 baskets that we made. We sold lots of them, and we also traded them for fish, vegetables, and for whatever we liked. As an object, it might not have much value, but it’s functional. They are very resistant, this one has two years and an half, and it hasn’t even broke. We use it everyday to put bread and things like that. Personally, I find it very valuable as an object because I made it. It was the learning process of something that was profitable and very simple, because it’s almost nothing.

 

When they are green, they are more beautiful; when they are recently made. Their aging process is very interesting. They are green, and then yellow, and then they start to be shiny and then they become dull.

How much did they cost? We sold them at 100 pesos. En Brazil, there is a very developed culture of craft, of things handmade. Personally, for what I have seen, for Brazilians, art craft has much more value than made in a factory. They were impressed by the simplicity of the object and they paid for it. We didn’t make any distinction about the size, they all cost the same for the work of the object itself. People bought them just as a decoration or to use it like we do.

We made them for like 5 months more or less. We had a lot of money because we didn’t spend much money. We didn’t pay for the palms, we just cut them and we didn’t need nothing else. It was all profit.