In the absence of colours, the presence of colour is felt.

In the absence of joyfulness, the presence of joy is realised.

In the absence of playfulness, the presence of play is seen.

In least trying, a maximum is observed.

In least thinking, an intuition arrives.

Part 1: Mind and seasoned hands: To make matchbox patchwork, the stitching craftsmen must assume single mind focus. Out tailor, Gurmel Singh blocks out all other distractions and carefully engages in picking each tiniest piece of fabric and aligning into the desired geometry. He then engages with it through cutting, ironing, aligning, joining, recutting, ironing, aligning, joining each box to construct new boxes. Over few days of meticulously joining each of these tiny scraps, a matchbox form of patches takes shape.

Part 2: Heart and untrained hands: The base textile of the sari is composed of plain textiles woven by Tai Khampti weavers from Arunachal Pradesh. We had brought about 500 kgs of cotton yarn to Arunachal Pradesh and took it as a drive to sensitise weavers towards using cotton over easily available synthetic yarns. This initiative brought livelihood to untrained weavers, single mothers, and older women to engage in weaving plain, checks and striped fabrics.

Holi hai!