Raw materials used at Kullu Karishma

Kullu Karishma started with Angora Wool as we have an Angora rabbit farm, the wool, which is technically a hair, is shorn with the help of scissors as soon as the length of the average fiber is long enough. The Angora wool is either spun pure / or it is blended with fine sheep wool which is mostly Australian in origin.
Besides Australian wool, local crossbred wool in the pure form is also handspun and used for making garments as it is also quite soft and has a good handle and feel to it. The other wool used is the local sheep wool which mostly goes into knitting footwear and handbags or it is woven into yardage or durries/floor mats.
Tussar which is a wild variety of silk, the worms feeding mostly on Oak leaves unlike the conventional silk in which the worms feed on Mulberry leaves, the fiber is lustrous and has a nice golden color to it. The fiber is handspun pure and or / blends with angora and/or with sheep wool are made and spun into different qualities.
The cotton fiber, which is mostly machine-spun, is used for knitting or crochet into variety of bags. It is also used in the warp for yardage and for floor mats/durries.

Different spinning techniques used at Kullu Karishma

The traditional drop spindle is used for spinning of the various types of fibers into yarn especially by the older women as they are very practiced in its usage and are averse to changing over to more improved and efficient spinning wheels. We suspect that it has to do more with the convenience of the drop spindle which is small and light to carry and you can spin with it almost anywhere, at home or while you are sitting on a boulder and also keeping a watch on your cows, sheep and goats who are grazing on the slope below you.
The younger lots of women prefer to spin with the Charka, which is a hand operated spinning wheel, with a large wheel which is rotated by hand which in turn rotates a spindle which is then used to spin the fiber. The normal spinning of fine and thick yarns is done as per the methods described above of the different kinds of fibers used by us. However the fiber designing is done on the Bradford and similar local spinning wheels, these are operated by feet leaving the hands free to design the pre-spun yarns into different shapes. Here the yarns can be of the same kind or alternatively of different kinds e.g. wool with a silk core or pure angora with a wool core. The yarns can vary in color so you can have multicolor designer yarns

Vegetable dying of the fiber

At Kullu Karishma we started with chemical dying of the yarn. Fortunately within a year we realized some how the chemical colour did not gel with kind of products we were producing. Beside the fact that procurement of chemicals was a problem and after the dying of yarn etc the workshop started giving a very messy and unhealthy look. We started a search for traditional vegetable dying in Kullu and other parts of the Himalayas. The vegetable dying was practiced by very few people. Basically it led to individuals who used to practice vegetable dying 40 to 50 years back which was very rudimentary in nature and the art of vegetable dying had died in late 40???s with the advent of machine spun chemical dyed yarns. This predicament forced us to hunt for vegetable dying in other parts of the country. We discovered that strong vegetable dying centres existed in Rajasthan , Andhra Pradesh , Karnataka etc however all of them were involved in the dying of cotton yarn fabric etc and wool was hardly dyed any were else in the country. Another interesting fact was that cotton dying was not only difficult but also cumbersome and time consuming besides the fact remained that the product did not have the desired colour fastness. With our trails almost half the treatments done with cotton could not be practiced with wool or angora since they were when compared to cotton much more delicate. However even by eliminating most of procedure involved with cotton dying we managed to get much stronger and faster colour on woolen yarn then were possible on cotton yarn however angora yarn always had softer and lighter colours than what was possible on pure woolen yarns. Since 1993 we have been using only vegetable colours for all our products. The other major philosophy developed over the years was as far as possible try and use only local dye stuffs. And within that also try and use items which would be under normal circumstances considered to be vegetable wastes. For example rinds of pomegranate, almonds, onions , walnuts etc or rose petals , waste tea leaves or eucalyptus leaves , plumb leaves , catechu waste etc.. Dyed stuff procured from outside is mostly indigo, henna and manjesta (Rubia cardifloria-sikkimese).
Basic dying techniques involve extraction of the color from the dyed stuff in boiling water once the color is extracted the mordant (alum, ferrous, copper, tin, chrome -salts) is added in such quantities that the colour of the dye is fixed and modified without leaving any traces of the mordant in the waste water. The fiber or the yarn is cooked in this bath for about 40 minutes with regular stirring so that the color is fixed on the yarn. The yarn is than washed in a neutral soap solution, rinsed and dried.

Knitting & Crochet

Majority of the products we do are hand knitted and a small portion is crocheted. The products made are sweaters [pullovers, cardigans], caps, socks, gloves, leg warmers, stoles and mufflers. Various types of knitting are done which ranges from plain knits to variety of cable designs, raised patterns and their combinations. The various colored yarns are also used to make different products having a range of patterns and designs. The knitting is done in close knits to produce a clean regular fabric to the other extreme in which loose knitting is done on thick needles depending on the kind of look required as well as the type of yarn which is being used

Normally a single woman will take from four to eight days to knit one garment depending upon its size, pattern and thickness of the yarn. The socks take anywhere from 2 to 4 days and caps from a day or two. The time taken will also vary according to the season of the year or really how much she can spare from her other regular work.
The crochet is mostly done with cottons to make hand bags and purses. Here again the size and the pattern to be done will determine the time taken to make any particular product

Hand Weaving

The hand weaving is done at the weavers at home and mostly men are involved in the process. The four pedal looms are used for the weaving. The commonly practiced weave for commercially sold Kullu shawls is the twill weave whereas the fabric woven for personal use is mostly woven on the traditional pit looms the simple weave is used to make the fabric. We at Kullu Karishma however weave in a number of weaves ranging from simple weave when designer yarn is used to twill weave for the plain shawl to twill weave to diamond twill or their combinations to weave yardage using angora, silk/tussar, local wool or Merino wool which can be handspun or machine spun on a woolen, cotton or silk/tussar warp. A single weaver can weave from one meter to five meters in a day depending on the weave, pattern and the kind of yarn being used.