These two men make coconut as an attractive craft

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These two men make coconut as an attractive craft

Crafters of face carvings from coconuts are showing one of their works in the Dobi Street Ponam Gallery no. 35 kelurahan Pondok, Padang City, West Sumatra, on Wednesday March, 6 2019 ANTARA PHOTOS / Kurnia / 19.

Padang (ANTARA) - Two brothers, making coconuts as crafts by carving coconuts into human faces. At the beginning they made this effort because they saw a lot of discarded coconut waste and the amount of coconut that had no contents scattered in the city of Padang, so that interest arose to manage it into something of value for sale.

The craftsman said, the business he carried out, was initiated from 1990 but had been vacuumed and began to be practiced since 2014 until now. Buyers are generally 85 percent from foreign tourists, the rest from local residents and tourists that visited to Padang city who accidentally passed in front of his shop.

The price of one coconut carving from IDR 75 thousand to IDR 200 thousand depends on the size of the coconut and the difficulty of making it. While the carving price for the piece of coconut shell is only IDR 10 thousand.

The tools used to make carvings are still very simple by using a cutter knife, to buy more sophisticated tools, crafters need more capital. The process of making coconut carvings takes 2 hours per engraving, if there is an order then the time needed can be even longer up to 3 hours or even one day. Prices of coconuts ordered are different from those already carved, which is IDR 300 thousand per carving.

The two artisans said they needed business capital to expand their business and buy more sophisticated equipment. "At the moment our constraints are on the capital, if there is capital, we can buy complete equipment to make carvings and be able to develop this store to be even bigger." Afrinayul craftsman (54) said in his shop.

The coconut carving business, named Tonam Gallery, was pioneered by two younger brothers named Zainal and Afrinayul and has received many awards from the Tourism and Culture Office.

"I hope my business will be assisted by the government or other institutions, may be they can help in the form of capital, or promote my business so that more people will know it, because we don't have time to promote it on social media," said craftsman Zainal (52) .



Written by : Internship Student of ANTARA SUMBAR 2019 from English Department State Polytechnic of Padang