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TINTSABA
After a customer visited a shop selling Tintsaba jewellery on the Swasiland border last year, and was impressed by the quality of the products and the idea behind the business, I decided to import and sell some Tintsaba jewellery at my Jewellery Parties.
Although everything else for sale on my website is handmade by me, I have decided to stock Tintsaba products because I feel that I can help women to help themselves by
selling their jewellery. I hope you like it as much as I do.
ABOUT TINTSABA
Since 1985, Tintsaba Crafts has run a rural development project in the Northern Hhohho region of Swaziland. The project works with women's groups producing and marketing quality crafts. The project is an outstanding success, with some 600 women now producing a wide range of traditional and innovative crafts , including tableware, functional baskets, collectors' baskets, trays, natural jewellery and woven sisal disks for Tintsaba's silver jewellery with the finest quality weaving in sisal in Africa.
Tintsaba's rural development project enables women to earn income to supplement the family budget without leaving their families. Tintsaba builds on traditional knowledge of craft production. Frequent quality upgrading and pattern development are undertaken through encouraging mentor relationships and training programmes.
Tintsaba demonstrates a strong social and environmental commitment to its women's groups through trainings on subjects such as AIDS awareness, living positively with AIDS and permaculture. Tintsaba has also organised a tree-planting workshop.
The environmental focus of the company is carried through to the raw materials used in the Development Project. A large range of products, including jewellery, is made from sisal, which is an invasive weed. Sisal is used in Swaziland to make cattle fences. Because it is a weed, it is ideal for craft production since harvesting does not threaten the country's natural biodiversity.
In 1999, Tintsaba established the Silver Jewellery workshop, with the objective of combining the best woven sisal disks with sterling silver. Rural women weave the sisal disks using traditional basketry techniques on a greatly refined scale. In making sisal jewellery, every step is carried out by hand since machine-prepared sisal yields inferior results. Before sisal is ready, the fibres must be stripped, cleaned, and spun by hand. It takes years of training to be able to weave the sisal disks used in the framed sisal range. The increased value of the product enables us to pay top prices to the women weaving the sisal disks.
Jude's Jewels is the only importer of Tintsaba jewellery in the UK.
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