Botswana Craft Take Two

The crafts of Botswana are very beautiful and because we found the style of design throughout the work to be really lovely, we decided that we wanted to do another craft. We saw some gorgeous baskets here that we contemplated trying to recreate, but decided that it was maybe a bit too ambitious. We looked at a lot of different arts and crafts of Botswana, from woven tapestries to clay pots but one art form that really stood out to us was Lekgapo. 


Lekgapo is an art form practiced by the indigenous women of Botswana. They use mud mixed with cow dung and decorate the outside of their homes with it. These designs are so nice that my littles and I decided to try to recreate this concept. We opted to leave out the poo, and actually, we also opted to leave out the mud. We had some air dry clay left over from this Peruvian project that we did, so we used that. 

Aiden flattening his clay.

Eliana flattening her clay slab. She decided to add water to hers thinking it might make it softer. What it actually did was make it slipperier, and had I not put the camera aside just after taking this picture, I might have captured a shot of the clay launching out of her hands and across the table, like a slippery piece of soap.

Using a craft stick to draw the designs.

Painting the design black, to get a sharper contrast.

Aiden's finished Americanized Lekgapo. 

Eliana's finished Americanized Lekgapo. 

My finished Americanized Lekgapo. 

I really like the finished look of these and I am thinking of mounting them to a board and display them together somewhere in our home. 

With our final craft complete, it is time to start planning our end of the tour dinner. I'll be sharing that with you next week.