Happy Halloween!

Bag from Kachchh

The obsession of bags continues...

Hand embroidered bag from Kachchh, Gujarat

Solapur Bags

Pishvi in marathi, kothada in guajarati, chila in kannada and sanchi in teulgu, thaili in hindi or a chick tote bag… call it whatever but it remains a simple and useful basic bag of its kinds. Everyone uses such a bag at least once in life and many have their lives revolving around this.

I pass through many street shops selling such basic bags everywhere, but there is something different about such shops in Solapur. They also sell bags unique to Solapur and those are the bags stitched from chaddars. These bags are referred to as ‘Chadarichya pishvya’ in Marathi.

Bag seller @ Lakshmi market, Solapur

Variety of Bags at the above shop

These bags are made from the jacquard woven chaddar fabrics which either are excess pieces from the loom or are initial weave trials or either have some weave defects. These are purchased from the weaving units and are locally stitched on a small scale for local market sales. You might find this a very mundane thing but NO! It is an ingenious sustainable product. Made from excess/waste, this bag also adds to employment to some extent and is also very useful.
I got the above bag from my grandfather and he tells me that it is about 25 years old. And that means it is older than me! He had bought this bag for Rs. 3/-. Now you just have to add a zero to this which makes it Rs. 30/-. Striking motifs unambiguously woven into colorful stripes are simply superb. These bags are my current subject of interest for exploration. Wait for it... it is going to be legendary!!

Vegetable Wheel

Preparation for today's dinner... veg pulav!!

Thematic Rangoli: Save Water

Wishing all of you a very Happy and Colorful Diwali!!

During the festival of lights; during Diwali, the rangoli just cannot be missed. Apart from food, rangoli was (and still is) one of the subjects of my interest. During my school days I always tried to be creative in some or the other way to make my rangoli different from others in the apartment. Thanks to my dear Aai (mother) for giving me full freedom in my naive creativity then!! Unfortunately, I haven't documented any of my rangolis before this and I really miss that!... for having done not the regular traditional patterns but some very creative stuff for which I fall short of words!! I can just say that joining the dots becomes really boring. I remember how I learnt doing the rangoli, filling colors in my own crude way and then finishing it in a more cruder way!! Oh! This is getting too nostalgic now...but I'm liking it! Or should I put it as 'I'm lovin it!' I had also done a huge peacock rangoli for which i had won a second prize in school and my uncle had gifted me some valuable money for having done real fabulous work!! Ok! enough of self praising...

Since yesterday, Aai is after me saying, "Aarti, tomorrow early in the morning you have to do the rangoli in the porch", and she has repeated this for more than ten time and I am not exaggerating!! Well... well... then today morning I successfully did the rangoli part of my job and came up with a design shown in pictures below...

Weird, is it?!! May be! Or very creative!! Confused??!!!

Thanks again to Aai for supporting my sooper creative thoughts for this rangoli! I just do not know why I thought of this but it just occurred to me like a spark and without giving it a second thought I completed it. And I am telling everyone passing by this piece of my art that, “Save Water- is the theme of this rangoli.” and no need to explain further… :D :D :D

Not bad! Not bad! Some kind of thematic rangoli!!

I miss landscape painting…

Siddheshwar lake @ night

It is simple and nice with a canvas, few paints and brushes. It’s your own world in there. Few hours and the story is over. Life is about making stories and making many more stories. Life is sometimes about filling in colors and sometimes about making things colorful. It is easy to fill colors but it is difficult to make things colorful.

Fall

Nostalgia takes up suddenly when I realize that it’s been long since my last post. You have interesting subjects to write on, but you are just not in a mode to write and you still want to post something… this is the scene with me for this particular post. Being into the ‘fall’ mode of designing, here are some falling leaves with fall colors… this is all that I can say. I await some maple and oak leaves to fly over to me with added grape leaves to work on some actual hands-on textures.

Also, a crave for doing new things at the edge of two disciplines with striving allies has taken up corners in my mind these days. Creativity begins at the edge of two disciplines; they say; I do believe in the same and this lead me to start two new blogs (wait for the first post) Agility rules and Hastakari with Amol and Aayushi respectively. Amol is an art director, the advertising guy one can say and Aayushi is an industrial designer working with glass and ceramics. Their whereabouts can be soon explored on the blogs. Though blogging is just part-a-way of being visible online, I am quite excited on working on this…nonetheless with naïve ideas but encouraged to make them obtrusive enough for further inspirations!! is what I look forward!

Pattern

Cris-cross hatching creates a textured pattern here.

Boo!!! BooOOO!!! BooOOoooOOO!!!

Halloween is approaching...

It's Halloween time this month. Lets BOO!!OOO!OOOO!!

Silverware

The drawings of too many pots is composed into a beautiful pattern with colors and textures giving them a silverware feel. The 'in-kitchen' things being my favourite, this print can be used for kitchen towels with coordinated stripe and waffle weaves thus making it a set of three.