Sarawak hand-woven basket is a traditional handicraft and also a cultural symbol in Sarawak. There are various shape and size of the hand-woven basket that could be made, depends on the purpose of the basket made. The basket is light, stable and weight-bearing. It is also multipurpose, as you can carry things as well as put something inside. Besides that, it can also be a decoration. The basket is washable. You can simply rinse it in the water and wash it.
Therefore, the basket is durable to be used.
In the traditional manner, the residents use rattan as the main material to make the basket. However, the preparation of material takes a long period of time because they need to harvest and prep the rattan. In the modern manner, they weave the basket using plastic trapping with multiple colours that make the basket looks more attractive and fashionable. The residents in Sarawak also modify the basket with diverse pattern. The plastic trapping can be simply bought from the market and hardware shops in Sarawak.
This multipurpose hand-woven basket has become the source of income of the residents because they sell it as a souvenir to the tourist who travelling in Sarawak, and as a practical things to the other residents. Moreover, it offers job opportunity to those people, especially to the women with excellent weaving skills so that they are able to gain economic independence.
Our workshop is to teach the students in UNIMAS about the ways of making the attractive and useful Sarawak traditional hand-woven basket using different colours of plastic trapping. We decided to make a basic pattern and small size of basket due to the time constraints of our workshop. Our objective is to boost the interest and talent in weaving the Sarawak traditional basket. In addition, it is also aimed to promote the unique and beautiful culture of Sarawak to the peninsular students.
On 18th November 2018 (Sunday), we held the workshop at the FEB Student Lounge, there are 15 students who volunteer to join our workshop to learn the weaving skill. We gave presents to the top 3 students who do the best hand-woven basket so that they can be more intensive to make the basket. Asides from that, the participants also express their interests in making the basket.
During the workshop, we learned something, such as communication skill to interact with the people. Although we have achieved our objectives of workshop, we faced some problems before and during the workshop. It is our responsibility to find out the solution to prevent the same problem occurs in the next time. Therefore, we do review after the project and discuss about the improvement that need to do.
Finally, we really appreciate all the participants to support our workshop. We also fully express our gratitude to our lecturer, Mr Ahmad Syubaili bin Mohamed who gives us the opportunity to do the workshop as we could learn a lot of knowledge and gain good experience in planning and implementing a workshop. The teamwork and cooperation of our group members are the main keys of the success of the workshop. We hope that we can have another opportunity to do a better workshop in the next time.