Our recent collection of hand-quilted quilts/bed-spreads are designed and crafted by the women of Dambal, a small village in North Karnataka.
The women-folk of Dambal have been traditional quilters for generations. These enterprising women travel to nearby cities periodically and collect worn-out clothes and sarees from various houses and convert them into quilts and give them back to their respective owners and earn their living. Each woman has her territory in the nearby city to collect the waste textiles and seldom trespass with others.
We have been providing these craftswomen with some of our sarees, and textile bits that were unfit to sell as-is hence had to be converted into usable quilts, with only one condition that they do not cut the sarees/fabric without purpose. (Had seen them cutting the sarees with the help of a sickle earlier, that's another story!) The idea being, the more we cut the fabric into small patches for aesthetic purposes, the more we waste the textile again.
The threads for quilting comes from specialized street hawkers who sell varieties of waste/excess yarn collected from many local weaver's co-operative societies.
These quilts/bed-spreads are not listed as per single/double cot size but in inches, simply because the measuring technique most of these women prefer is by Cubit. (1 Cubit = length from elbow to the fingertip)
Though the process of cutting and measuring the fabric feels medieval, in reality, these working women, with their craft and dedication, are the epitome of recycling hence sustainable craft/culture practitioners, which the world is now waking up to.
