Water hyacinth is a fast-growing plant that spreads across rivers and canals in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, often clogging waterways used for fishing and transport. Clearing it is necessary work — and it also produces a material with a long history in Vietnamese craft.
Once harvested, the plant is dried beside the river before it's woven. Drying is what gives the fiber its strength and its warm, straw-like color, and it has to happen outdoors, in the sun, before the material is ready to work with.
Dried water hyacinth is woven by hand into baskets, using techniques passed between generations in the workshops that specialize in it. Every basket is shaped and finished by hand, which is why no two are ever perfectly identical.
A half-moon handbag hand-woven from water hyacinth, finished with a round natural handle. Available in S / M.
Water hyacinth turns a plant that would otherwise be cleared and discarded into something durable and useful. It fits the way we think about materials in general — nothing here is mass-produced, and the things we choose to work with often start out as a problem someone else needed to solve.
