United States · Household Craft / Fiber Binding
Broomsquiring (regional craft-name)
The hand-winding and stitching of dried broomcorn (a sorghum variety) around a wooden handle using foot-tensioned twine, producing functional and decorative hearth brooms and whisks in forms including the turkey wing, hawk tail, and cathedral weave, sustained continuously for a century at one Kentucky liberal arts college's craft program.
Risk level: Vulnerable · Not Applicable — the United States is not a State Party to the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage; no US technique can be formally ICH-inscribed regardless of significance.
The design and hand-fabrication of water-resistant earrings and bangles from recycled newspaper and cardboard by American designer Luda, working under the name Alla Maude in Long Beach, New York, part of the same wider international…
The carving and painting of devotional wooden figures (bultos, carved fully in the round) and painted panels (retablos) depicting saints and scenes from the life of Christ, a tradition dating to the mid-1700s when Franciscan missionaries…
A 19th-century New Mexican craft transforming discarded commercial tin cans into elaborately punched, stamped, and soldered devotional frames, nichos (hanging niches), and household fixtures, adapting older Spanish leather-working punch…
A distinctive self-couched embroidery stitch — long laid stitches tacked down at a 45-degree angle — developed in Spanish colonial New Mexico to decorate wool coverlets, church vestments, and altar cloths, understood by scholars as one of…
A distinct Hispano weaving tradition developed by Spanish colonial settlers in the Rio Grande watershed of northern New Mexico from the early 1600s, using churro sheep wool descended from flocks brought by the Coronado expedition,…
A sewn-plank ocean-going canoe built without internal ribs or frame, constructed from split redwood driftwood planks drilled, sewn together with plant-fiber cordage, and waterproofed with yop (a mixture of pine pitch and natural asphaltum)…
The coiled weaving of baskets from mokolwane (real fan palm, Hyphaene petersiana) leaf fiber by Bayei and Hambukushu women of Botswana's north-western Ngamiland region, primarily in the Okavango Delta villages of Etsha and Gumare, widely…
The harvesting, hand-processing, spinning, dyeing, and net-weaving of chaguar (Bromelia hieronymi), a spiny wild bromeliad native to the semi-arid forests of the Gran Chaco, into fishing nets, clothing, small bags (yikas), and —…
The hand-breaking, drilling, and stringing of ostrich eggshell into disc beads by San (Basarwa) artisans of Botswana, one of the longest continuously practiced material-culture traditions documented anywhere in the world, with…
The weaving of palm leaves (lag'aray laué), totora reed (che'ena), and rush (na'até) into baskets by women of the Qom (Toba) people, an indigenous nation of the Gran Chaco spanning Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia, concentrated in…
The hand-weaving of dried vacoa (Pandanus/screw-pine) leaves into baskets, backpacks, hats, mats, and household objects along Réunion's eastern and southern coastlines, formally documented in the French Ministry of Culture's own national…
The hand-shaping and painting of ceramic vessels drawing directly on pre-Hispanic Diaguita-Calchaquí decorative motifs, alongside the weaving of baskets from poleo and simbol — native fibers of the arid Calchaquí Valleys — practiced in and…