03Craft 3 of 5
Patchwork&Appliqué
Cut-work, canopies and the pieced quilts of Saurashtra.
Small pieces of cloth, cut freehand and sewn into something larger than themselves. Appliqué is the great needle art of Gujarat, and Honeycomb has been making it for the world’s homes for more than fifty years.
Appliqué and patchwork are the arts of the scrap. In the villages of Saurashtra and Kutch, offcuts of red, indigo and white cotton were pieced into canopies, door hangings (toran), wall panels (chakla) and quilts, worked with peacocks, elephants, riders and sun-wheels. Our own mark, the horse and rider, comes from this tradition.
Our craftsmen cut the motifs with heavy iron shears, without templates, then turn under the edges and stitch them invisibly to the ground. Reverse appliqué, where the top layer is cut away to reveal colour beneath, gives our white-on-white cutwork bedcovers and curtains their translucent, snowflake quality.
We work in both traditional vocabularies and clean contemporary forms: a tree of life in cotton with brigades of riders on camels and elephants, or a single spiral on charcoal linen.
In the workshop
The making of it.
What we make with it
- Quilts & bedcovers
- Cutwork curtains
- Cushions
- Wall hangings
- Canopies & torans
- Tablecloths
Made to order, to your design or ours. Ask for a sample.
Enquire about patchwork
