Read our
JOURNAL
The Pin Project Viewed from the Ground: A Guest Blog
- Sofya Saheb
- 10.07.18
The Pin Project is an initiative ISHKAR launched on Kickstarter last year. We raised over £63,000 to provide jewellery training and work for displaced people living in Burkina Faso, Turkey, Jord...
Soqotra: The Evolution of an Alien Island
- ISHKAR
- 28.05.18
Give a child a packet of crayons and tell them to draw a fantasy island, and they might well conjure up the Yemeni island of Soqotra.
LET'S WORK IT OUT!
- ISHKAR
- 12.12.17
As humans, we crave order. For many, productive work provides this structure. The world around us might be chaotic. But with work we can, at least at times, control what we do in a way we are ra...
Tradition as Radical
- ISHKAR
- 25.07.17
At the beginning of this year, Flore and I found ourselves at the world trade fair for homewares, Maison et Objet in Paris. After a morning of walking through the colossal trade halls we were qu...
Handmade - so what?
- ISHKAR
- 20.07.17
Once a hipster trend, the desire for handmade goods has become thoroughly mainstream. It can be seen from the meteoric rise of Etsy, right through to proliferation of the word ‘artisan’ on produ...
Risk: Sliced, Diced and Sprinkled On Top
- ISHKAR
- 13.07.17
As wedding season approaches, we have been getting an increasing number of exasperated customers asking when our most popular glasses will be back in stock again. Well, here's the honest answer ...
Traces of Aleppo
- ISHKAR
- 08.05.17
Fig 1. Traces of Aleppo [source unknown] Zaina Sabbagh bought her first wooden printing block when she was 14. She found it in the Aleppo Souk where she was sho...
Timbuktu & Back
- ISHKAR
- 05.04.17
I remember singing a nursery rhyme about Timbuktu when I was in primary school. I can’t remember what it was now – was it ‘from Kalamazoo to Timbuktu’? – but I remember the images clearly. A fab...
Can 'crafts' really drive serious economic growth?
- ISHKAR
- 28.09.16
Yet we would be wrong to think of crafts as a small sector at the fringes of the global economy. Far from it, crafts are in fact the second largest employer in the developing world, and have a p...
Load More