Sand painting is a ritual that the Navajo use as part of healing ceremonies. A healer sprinkles colored powders such as charcoal or sand on the ground, forming designs, using their right hand and starting from the center, chanting. Designs tend to be formed within a circle. Sand paintings may also be produced for the tourist industry, placing glue on a base material before sprinkling on a design. Using designs that the Navajo utilize in their healing rituals is frowned upon.
The Navajo traditionally make baskets for practical purposes and for religious purposes. The main basket-making medium they use is the three-leaf sumac, though they also use willow or yucca. The process of making Navajo baskets involves the coiling method, in which fiber is coiled into a basket shape, and woven together, weaving left to right. Coiling tends to start with a knot of sumac fibers that the basket maker works outwards from. In their designs, the Navajo use various colors and symbols that are significant to their culture, and may also work in beads. Traditionally a "pathway" is woven in the design going from the basket's center to the edge of the basket, for a spiritual reason.
Traditionally the process of weaving a Navajo blanket involved tools that were carved by hand, and those tools were passed on from generation to generation. The preparation process for weaving involved herding your own sheep, shearing them, cleaning and carding the wool, spinning and dying the wool for the weft, gathering dye material, gathering water to dye with, dying the weft, spinning the warp and stringing up the warp on the loom. After the warp is strung, the weft is woven through it, and evenly compacted with a comb. A method interlocking various colors of weft is employed to make multicolored designs. Like the baskets, a "pathway" is woven from the design to the edge of the weaving.
The Navajo learned silversmithing from the Spanish in the mid-1800s. Navajo silver working methods include wire twisting, soldering, casting and incising. Tools used for silversmithing went through periods of change and development. A rise in the popularity of turquoise among Navajo silversmiths, now the most common gem used today in Navajo silversmithing, began in the 1870s. Types of art produced by the Navajo include such things as bracelets, necklaces, earrings, rings, beads and belt buckles.
The Navajo traditionally use the coiling and pinching method of making pottery. This method consists of making a clay base, then building the walls via long ropelike lengths of clay and coiling upward, adding another length when one length ends, pinching the ends together. The sides are then smoothed. Pots today are fired in a pit with juniper branches as kindling. Before it completely cools, the potter traditionally coats the piece with pine pitch both inside and outside. Pottery was traditionally made for ceremonial reasons or for everyday use, and women were the traditional potters. Designs on pottery are not traditional. Unlike other cultures, part of what the Navajo do not do traditionally is grind up shards of old pottery to mix into the clay for making new pottery. It is a traditional belief that old pottery belongs to the ancestors.