Where Your Saree Comes From
Nine towns, forty-two families, and a technique in each that took generations to settle.
A weaving cluster is not a factory town. It is a place where one technique has been refined for long enough that the water, the yarn supply, the dye houses and the looms have all arranged themselves around it — which is why a Patola woven anywhere but Patan is a Patola in name only.
We buy at the loom in nine of them.
Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu — korvai silk
Heavy mulberry silk on pit looms, with the border woven separately and interlocked into the body by hand. The korvai join takes two weavers working the same loom, and it is the reason a real Kanjivaram border does not come away from the field however hard you pull it. A heavy piece is eleven days of work.
Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh — Banarasi brocade
Gold and silver zari worked into jaal, buti and kadhwa patterns on jacquard looms. A densely brocaded Banarasi can take a month. The city has been weaving for Mughal courts and everyone since, and the vocabulary of its motifs — the shikargah hunting scene, the paisley boota — is older than most of the countries buying it.
Patan, Gujarat — Patola double ikat
The most technically demanding weave in India. Both warp and weft are tied and resist-dyed to the pattern before weaving begins, and must then meet on the loom within a millimetre. There are very few families left doing true double ikat. A saree can take five months.
Phulia, West Bengal — jamdani muslin
A UNESCO-listed craft. The weaver inserts every motif freehand into fine muslin with no punch card and no pattern to follow, counting warp threads by eye. Bengal jamdani is the lightest structured weave we sell.
Chanderi, Madhya Pradesh — cotton-silk transparency
Chanderi’s glassy hand comes from refusing to degum the silk yarn, which most mills do as a matter of course. The result is a saree that reads as translucent in daylight and still holds a pleat.
Kaithoon, Rajasthan — Kota Doria
Woven in khat: tiny squares of alternating cotton and silk yarn, in a fixed ratio that gives the cloth its graph-paper texture and its weight. At around 300 grams, it is the lightest saree you can buy anywhere.
Sonepur, Odisha — Sambalpuri bandha
Ikat again, but single — the yarn tied and dyed in the bandha method, with motifs of conch, wheel and flower that resolve as the weaver works. Odisha’s ikat is softer-edged than Gujarat’s, and that feathering is the signature.
Bhagalpur, Bihar — tussar
Tussar silk is reeled from cocoons the moths have already left, which gives it the irregular slub texture and the honey colour it is known for. It has the sheen of silk and roughly the weight of cotton.
Ajrakhpur, Gujarat — natural-dye block printing
Not a weave but a print: sixteen stages of printing, washing and resist-dyeing in madder, indigo and iron. The cluster relocated wholesale after the 2001 earthquake and rebuilt itself around the craft.
Why the cluster is on the product page
Most handloom that reaches a city showroom has passed through three or four hands, and by the time it arrives nobody can tell you who wove it. We buy direct and pay before dispatch, so the name is still attached — and on a typical saree roughly 46% of what you pay reaches the weaving family.
That is the whole business, really: putting the maker back into the description. You can read more about how we work on our About Us page, or start with the silk sarees and the cotton sarees themselves — every product page names the cluster and the technique.