Interwoven Paths
- a collection of natural dyed woven stoles for Aranya Natural, Munnar
“Coming together is a beginning,
Keeping together is a progress,
Working together is a success.”
Keeping together is a progress,
Working together is a success.”
– Henry ford
Aranya Natural is a natural dye unit under Srishti welfare trust, Munnar, Kerala, established in 1994 as an effort to explore the primal dyeing traditions by using the locally available flora from the forest and a platform to provide vocational rehabilitation to differently able children and adults of the tea estates.
Aranya natural excels in the art of shibori and natural dyeing. They were looking to venture into woven products to expand their product range and target a wider consumer. Thus the idea of a pilot project of yarn dyed woven products was conceived and taken up as a graduation project.
The project had the scope of working directly with artisans in two different sectors , i.e weaving and dyeing, to be a part of community development and building a new direction for the organisation. The initiation of the project was challenging as it required to build a channel between Aranya and woven clusters. It began with understanding the organization's needs, identifying the woven cluster according to their requirements, collaborating with weavers,sourcing of yarns, building business relationship with co-operatives, explorations of design directions directly on loom, sampling, final production and costing.
The weaving was done in collaboration with weavers from Phulia, West Bengal
The challenge was to design samples to be woven from on single warp yet with varied outcome.
Indigo dyed cotton warp ready for loom set-up, Phulia, West Bengal
