Winter in Amritsar: what to wear, and when
From the first cold nights of November to the fog of January, a month-by-month guide.
A morning with our weavers in Srinagar
What happens on the loom before a shawl reaches the counter in Amritsar.
Every January Jasleen travels to Srinagar to meet the families who weave for us. The looms are in the ground-floor rooms of old houses in the downtown mohallas, and the work starts after morning tea, when the light is good.
A pashmina loom is a wooden frame about two metres wide, worked by one weaver sitting on a plank. The warp is set up first, and that alone takes two days: hundreds of hand-spun threads, each tied in by fingers. Pashmina yarn is too fragile for a fast loom, so the weaver passes the shuttle gently and beats each row lightly. A plain shawl grows by about 10 cm a day.
Kani weaving is slower again. The weaver follows a coded pattern written on paper, called a talim, and works dozens of small wooden spools through the warp for each row. On a complex stole, a good day’s work is a few centimetres.
We pay the families when we order, not when we sell. We also order through the slow summer, so the looms do not stand idle in June. When the bale arrives in Amritsar in autumn, we unfold every piece on the counter, weigh it, and write the weaver’s name in our book.
