This weekend we visited the market town of Catacaos, it is
such a beautiful town with lots of things to buy from fine jewellery, to
pottery, wooden utensils, weaved baskets, hammocks, stuffed animals, leather
goods and so much more.
Street after street has more artesian goods.
We also visited the food market, which included streets
selling vegetables, fruits and grains, an indoor strip of fishmongers and then
a hall of butchers.
As Catacaos is known for its crafted goods we were lucky to
find a little workshop of gentlemen who were creating metal goods; the kindly
showed us some of their methods.
My favourite method was when he took a small piece of metal
and began putting it through an Italian machine with grooves in. This machine
made the piece of metal elongate and become a perfect cylinder.
He then used the other side of the machine, a laminator,
which flattened the metal and also elongated it. It took many goes of passing
it through the machine for it to reach a thin piece of metal. However he then
heated it with a gas blow torch attached to a foot pump, by heating up the
metal it made it become much more flexible and when it was put through the
laminator is became incredibly thin and long – a material that was now much
more suitable for jewellery creating.
