FROM VINTAGE SARI TO KANTHA QUILT

Our large kantha quilts are entirely hand stitched from recycled cotton saris that we hand select from vintage markets in India.  A sari is a piece of cloth worn by Indian women by draping over the body in varied styles. Our name come from the Anchal, the most decorative edge of the sari used to provide comfort and shelter to loved ones by draping it over the shoulder.

Have you ever wondered where the beautiful vintage fabrics come from that make up our one-of-a-kind kantha quilts?

While there are many places you can find kantha quilts these days, we truly pride ourselves on the quality and craftsmanship that go into creating our one-of-a-kind traditional kantha pieces. On average it will take an artisan 11-14 days to make a beautiful quilt with around 200 lines of traditional kantha stitching. A skilled artisan can typically produce 2 quilts per month.  But before the artisans can start bringing these quilts to life, they must have the perfect, softest, most beautiful cotton saris to use. 

We work hard to source the highest quality, 100% cotton saris from markets in Jaipur India. However, we recently were facing a challenge of finding the correct shades of saris for our production guidelines. Over 80% of the saris we were receiving from Jaipur were getting rejected by our project assistance for either quality or color issues. To help reduce this number of rejections and make the process more efficient, the team decided that moving forward, all saris would be hand selected by project assistants.

Two of our bright project assistants, Shama and Shakuntla recently took their first trip to Jaipur to hand-select "new" vintage cotton saris that would be used for our next order of kantha quilts. By strictly following guidelines, they decided to only bring back 100 of the 400 selected saris.  This process gave them an opportunity to shine as leaders and to make an important decision in the production process that would lead to overall better efficiency and less waste.

“To buy saris is a very small part of our journey. We truly enjoyed every moment, the ride of bus, coming to Jaipur, going to sari vendor in Bolero, watching the new market of Jaipur, sitting and enjoying the delicious lunch cooked by Motilal ji - just every part of it. It was a fun day of exploring for both of us, and we look forward to our visit again”