The craft isn't mine. The shapes are.

Who actually makes this

In villages across Saurashtra, bead weaving has been women's work for generations. It's done at home, between everything else a day demands, and it's usually treated as a hobby rather than a skill - which is one of the reasons it pays so badly.

It is not a hobby. Holding netting stitch in even tension across thousands of beads, with no frame to help you, is a technical skill that takes years to acquire and cannot be automated. The women I work with learned it from their mothers and aunts. I learned it from them.

So the arrangement is simple: they weave, I design and sell, and the work is paid for as skilled work. Every piece exists because a specific person sat down and made it.

The craft has a name

In Gujarat this work is called moti bharat - filling-up with beads. The beads have a name of their own too: kidiya moti, ant beads, for how small they are.

It began as work for the house rather than for a shop. The old repertoire belongs to a home and a wedding - the toran hung across a doorway, the chakla beside it, the indhoni that cushions a pot carried on the head. A new toran goes up for Diwali, and for a wedding.

A bride carried her own work with her. In Kathiawar it travelled in a pataro, a wooden chest, filled with pieces she had often been making since she was a girl. The beadwork was the wealth, not something bought with it.

The glass itself was never local. It was traded in - much of it Venetian - arriving through coastal ports like Ghogha and moving inland from there. Famine and war thinned the craft through the first half of the twentieth century, and the large, elaborate pieces largely stopped being made.

What I bring to it

Traditional bead jewellery is often made for occasions - weddings, festivals, a few days a year, then a drawer. I wanted the same weave in pieces you would actually reach for on a Tuesday.

That means editing hard: cleaner silhouettes, fewer elements, colours chosen to sit against ordinary clothes rather than only against bridal red. Same technique, same hands, different eye. Nothing about the craft is diluted - the shapes are simply made for now.

Why it's made to order

Nothing here sits in stock. You choose the shade and the length, and the piece starts after that. It takes roughly two weeks, which is not a marketing device - it is how long the weaving takes.

It also means nothing is wasted on guesses about what will sell, and no one weaves a net that nobody wanted.