Billums are traditional Papua New-Guinea string bags. The same name designates a variety of bags with different capacities, colors, shapes and carrying functions: from babies, to food, wood fire or personal possessions. Despite their formal variety, all billums are made in the same way, as a spiral of woven rows sewn together to form the bag receptacle. Each row is woven using the same fundamental technique, one that involves a simple strip that insures a homogeneous size in all the knots that make the bag. The strip used to be made of coconut leaves but now most of them are made of plastic. A medium-sized billum has between 18 and 20 woven rows, excluding the handle, which is made separately using a different-size strip. Although a natural string billum used to be made out of the inner fibers of the bark of a tree vine, most billums today are made of shredded tarp, hemp or cotton string. The versatility of this object is extraordinary, not just in terms of function but also in how it relates to the human body and the multiple different ways in which it is carried. Apart from being truly multifunctional, billums are truly wearable, unlike the majority of carrying bags we use (backpacks could be considered highly wearable but they are far less integrated with the human body than billums). Billums are fascinatingly multifunctional: the ingenuity and wisdom of other civilizations is, again, a great lesson in efficacy and beauty.
