India Girls

The last Monday of every month is our spinning meeting. This past Monday was a special treat as Marcia, Nancy and Beckie regaled us with their stories of their trip to India. Nancy's daughter is living in India for two years and arranged for the four of them to visit working artisans where they live and work.

They spent 3 weeks traveling around, gathering information on ancient dye techniques, watching people create beautiful things, and of course buying amazing goods.

Hand embroidered pillow

Beautiful quilts

cloth checkboard and seed stitched game pieces

Dyed silk scarf. Notice the tiny bluish dots. Those were made by gathering the material around very tiny seed beads and sewing them in. Then the fabric was dyed and the beads carefully removed. I cannot imagine the time this took and how they cut the seed beads out without cutting into the scarf.

Here is that technique again. wow, wow, wow!

This is all hand embroidered, black thread on white fabric.

The piece was covered with whimsical creatures.

hand dyed silk and hand embroidered

This type of stamping on material is called 'bandini' and is where our bandana fabric comes from.

hand woven silks

These rolling pins and spoons were coated in lac, which is a resinous secretion from various insects. The women watched the family make these by getting the lac hot, then spinning the wooden part while laying on the hot resin in these wonderful patterns.

We were called to lunch by these handcrafted bells.

And what a lunch it was! We were looking forward to this for weeks as Marsha and Becky are gourmet cooks and they whipped up about a dozen Indian dishes for us to try.

Indian food is my second favorite type of food (right behind Thai) and they did not disappoint.

We sampled their lasse, both sweet and spicy.

A slide show of the artisans, the scenery and some of the people they met showed us an insiders view of this amazing country. Thanks to the three of them for a very entertaining day and sharing their experiences with us.