The vibrant textiles of Guatemala embody its Mayan culture. Regional designs tell stories of time, creation and the ancestors. At La Escuela de Tejido in Xela (Quezaltenango), you can learn to weave simple patterns on a backstrap loom, using time-honored techniques perfected over centuries. The 100 percent worker-owned TRAMA is an association of 17 weaving cooperatives in the western Guatemalan highlands. Born from the ravages of the Guatemala’s civil war, TRAMA provides a way for Mayan women to earn a living wage while perpetuating their culture. La Escuela’s intimate setting lets you practice your Spanish as you share stories and laughs with the weavers. While learning to weave, you can trade English words with them and their children for Spanish, K’ich

Since 3000 BC, the mineral-rich mud pulled from the Kİzİlİrmak (Red River) as it flows through Avanos in central Turkey has fed the town’s fame as a center for high-quality earthenware. But the hands of Chez Galip, a local master artist, have helped propel a renaissance of the art after it lost ground to plastic products. A sixth-generation potter, Galip personally presides over a workshop and gallery installed in a large cave-house typical of this World Heritage-listed Cappadocia region. Complete with clay-stained şalvar (baggy Turkish trousers), he leads workshops in traditional kick-wheel methods, serves homemade wine and chats about the hundreds of designs on display. For something completely different: He also has an underground hair museum with a world-record collection of cuttings from the heads of 16,000 women!

The idea of the “folk school” — a precursor to today’s continuing education — has its roots in 19th-century Scandinavia, which makes finding one thriving in the woods in rural Alabama a bit surprising. Alabama Folk School (along with others like the John C. Campbell Folk School) was founded to keep arts and crafts alive in the local community. Adult campers learn banjo, woodturning, medicinal uses for native plants, pottery, basketry and a whole host of other traditional creative endeavors, but it is the quilt-making workshop that draws folks from far and wide. Alabama is famous for its avant garde quilters, the Gee’s Bend Collective. The works of these ladies are much closer to abstract textile collages than cozy blankies and have hung in prestigious museums around the world. Eager to share the vision and techniques that have been passed down through generations, Gee’s Benders Mary Ann and China Pettway run workshops teaching not only design, color composition and sewing techniques, but also the traditional songs and stories that fostered the addictive communal experience of quilting in their small town.

At Bomvu Paradise in Coffee Bay, visitors quickly find that time comes to a pleasant standstill. The pressures of the outside world just don’t infiltrate this wild and deserted beach landscape so beloved by surfers and backpacking eco-slackers. Here, you can spend five days with a Bomvana teacher making a drum with your own bare hands that would have taken five minutes (and some credit card space) to buy in a tourist shop. With your priceless hollowed-out tree trunk in hand, you are free to immerse yourself in drumming classes, circles and expert performances by the local Bomvu Tribal Rhythms band. Every year in July, the best drummers in South Africa converge on the beach for the Bomvu Cultural Drumming Festival. It starts out intense and traditional and over three days surreally morphs into a trance scene with DJs from all over coming to spin.

It’s just a mile-long vaporetto ride across the Venetian lagoon to the island of Murano, where colorful glass objects have been produced since the 1200s — in fact, the mirrors that reflected the most important faces of the European Renaissance were made right here. There’s a glass museum and — befitting a tourist trap (albeit a pleasing one) — an array of factories offering tours and demonstrations designed to wow you just enough to get you to part with your money as you exit through the gift shop. Not wanting to give away any trade secrets, the best artists generally don’t engage in the tourist shtick, but operate out of small galleries with exquisite and terrifyingly fragile (and expensive) works of art. The local glass school, Scuola del Vetro Abate Zanetti, offers more in-depth demonstrations and workshops where crafty visitors can learn the Murano techniques themselves.

Along the way from Huế City center to the mausoleum of Emperor Tự Đức, the L

Beige fabric, drizzled with hot wax and dipped into buckets of blue and yellow dye, transforms into an intricate painting of a village scene. Three yards of brilliant red, coated in wax, crinkled and dipped, tie a baby to his mother’s back. The vitality of Senegalese culture is reflected in the vibrancy of its batik textiles, and in Ziguinchor you can learn the art at Sherif’s workshop near the Guinea-Bissau Consulate (ask around or look for the sign on the side of the road). Sherif will guide you through the process, and his family will likely show you true Senegalese taranga (hospitality) with tea or rice while you wait for your creations to dry.

The appreciation of simple, everyday objects as functional works of art was part and parcel of Japan’s Mingei (folk arts) movement in the 1920s and ’30s. The tiny mountain village of Onta (sometimes Onda), Japan, is one of the best places to get a feel for how this modern philosophy preserved traditional crafts and created a sustainable market for them. Home to 10 potter families (and little else), the residents of Onta pound their clay using Korean-style kara-usu, traditional wooden seesaws with hammers on each end, powered by the water from a local stream. A pleasing byproduct of the process is that the town is permeated by the soft “thump-thump” sound of a heartbeat. Teapots, plates, bowls and cups are thrown on kick wheels, and all pottery is fired in wood-burning kilns. You can wander through the town’s one narrow road and stop in each of the 10 workshops to view the many different aesthetic manifestations of Onta’s trademark cream glaze with chocolate-colored notches. Each potter has his own style, yet — following the Mingei tenet of the “unknown craftsman” — all of Onta’s pottery bears the town’s unique mark, rather than that of any particular artist.

After a short time in Ubud — known as a thriving nexus of applied and fine Balinese arts like sculpture and carving, painting, jewelry making, and shadow puppetry — crafty culture vultures will want to get involved in a way that goes beyond charging it all on their credit cards. Responding to this need are, of course, numerous gurus, whose time can be booked for private instruction in legong and barong movements, gamelan-playing, mask making and much more. A more communal approach is to take workshops offered by Ubud’s most prominent cultural institutions like the Museum Puri Lukisan, the Agung Rai Museum of Art’s (ARMA), or the Pondok Pekak Library and Learning Center. Here you can leave after a day or two with a handmade kite or shadow puppet or spend a lifetime delving into the intricacies of the traditional Ubud painting style.

Ghor Al Mazra’a swelters in the below-sea-level Jordanian plains south of the Dead Sea. Few cared about its struggling residents until Rabee’ Zureikat visited in March 2007. Now micro-loans provided by his homespun Zikra Initiative have created sustainable income for 20 families and paid for two university scholarships. All this through community-based “exchange tourism” programs connecting urbanites and rural minority groups. A modest per-person participation fee funds hands-on social divide-bridging activities — Arabian eyeliner application, bread making, basket weaving, local crafts — and provisions the loan pool. Don’t miss the February bandora (tomato) season, when you can harvest the local best and then cook and eat a traditional galayet bandora (tomato stew) for lunch. Transport to/from Amman is provided.

The walls of Alfarer

Entering the smallish store on a dusty street in Sevar

Dipping your fingers in a vat of pulp may not seem like a must-do activity in Japan — until a visit to the Yame Traditional Arts and Crafts Center illustrates the timeless simplicity of handmade paper (washi). At the hands-on workshop in the back, master artisans slosh wooden screens through pulp-filled troughs to create everything from stationery sets to supersize works of art. Try your hand at a postcard set with traditional maple leaves or cherry blossoms pressed into the paper. Not so into paper-making? Artisans from all over the prefecture have booths in the Cultural Center — take a gander at bamboo experts weaving baskets, old couples folding fabric like origami, and hand-woven ikat cloth called Kurume Kasuri.

As you walk down a dirt path on the small island of Taquile on Lake Titicaca, you can’t help but feel as if you’ve gone back in time. There are no vehicles, no electricity. You round a corner and see a man, standing alone near the edge of a cliff seemingly pondering the vastness of the lake … knitting. You do a double-take. But yes, he really is knitting. For hundreds of years, the men of this tiny island have been knitting wool hats and they can often be seen strolling together, chatting, laughing … and knitting. UNESCO has declared the textile art of Taquile a masterpiece of humanity. On the island, knitting is a family endeavor: Boys learn the technique as early as age 5, while girls are taught to process the wool and yarn. Colorful styles indicate the wearer is married, white ones scream “single!”