Leslie and I belong to a small group of sociable stitchers. We are all creative women, all busy, involved in work and community activity. We meet in each others houses in turn. The hostess (or sometimes the partner of the hostess) cooks and the food is an important element in the pleasure of the stitching evening. Even more important, however, possibly more than the stitching, is the talk. Our tongues wag faster than our needles often!!
We work on whatever we feel like working at the time. I like traditional, folk, antique forms of textile & needlework. Leslie likes to break new ground - the techniques may be traditional, but her designs are all her own and avant garde.
Planning for the adventure began over a year ago, when Leslie sent me the prospectus for a textile trip of the United Kingdom and asked if I was interested. I looked at the price and thought she was joking. Some time later I showed her an advertisement of a very very much cheaper Indian textile tour as a response. I didn't know that Leslie had long had a fascination with things Indian. "Would you?" she said. "I might" said I.
So the adventure really started from there. We looked closely at that tour, we started googling Indian textile tours, we started talking about what we wanted in a tour in terms of how we liked to travel, we talked to other people. We discovered we both preferred to move around less - to get to know a smaller number of places well, to get the feel of how it might feel to live in a place, meet local people, walk down the road to buy a loaf of bread .... We preferred country & rural to city and didn't really want a monument to monument tour. We liked the idea of being able to meet the embroiderers and to learn some of their techniques.
We narrowed them down to a couple of tours and eventually settled on tours run by Sydney based textile artist, Carole Douglas. Carole's has a special interest in the Kachchh area of the state of Gujarat in North Western India, where Hindu and Muslim villagers along the edge of the Rann of Kachchh - a salt water desert (scorchingly hot & dry for much of the year, inundated for the remainder). Her tours aim to support the continuation of the traditional crafts which even here are endangered by encroaching global trends & cash economies. They aim to assist Kachchhi textile workers to take a living from their craftwork. We approached Carole and then waited for a sufficient group to form to make our tour viable.
We are now at the really exciting stage - 8 women including Carole will set off in two weeks. We are working out what to take, ordering visas, organising travel vaccinations & medications, stocking up on mosquito coils & every form of insect repellent, and considering the wardrobe in terms of lightweight, easycare, insect & UV resistant clothing & shoes - bearing in mind the exotic varieties of disease carrying mosquitos. The gradual disappearance of the mosquito coils should make space for the scrumptious textiles we hope to purchase en route. We are going through our itinerary researching the places & people we will see - and in the process I have discovered how useful other people's blogs, photographs and Youtube highlights can be - and it has inspired me to start my own.
