Our craft
Nine days,
two people, one cloth.
Kota Doria is not a fabric you can hurry. It is woven on pit looms sunk into the floor of village houses outside Kota, in Rajasthan, by people who learnt it from the person sitting beside them.
01 The khat
The name tells you what it is. Doria means thread; the khat is the small square check that appears when cotton and silk cross at an even, open tension. Cotton gives the cloth its body and its coolness. Silk gives it the faint shine and the strength to hold a shape. Neither would work alone.
A weaver counts the threads by eye. There is no machine setting to recover if the tension drifts — the check simply stops being square, and everyone can see it. This is why the cloth cannot be rushed, and why two pieces from the same loom are never quite identical twins.
“You cannot weave this cloth in a hurry. It will show.”
02 The colour
We dye in small lots, mostly with natural colour — indigo in a living vat, madder for red, pomegranate and turmeric for the yellows. A living vat is a slightly temperamental thing. It is fed, rested, and read by eye, and it gives a blue that no synthetic quite matches: uneven in the best way, and softening for years.
Blocks are cut for us in Bagru and printed by hand. On an open weave the ink sinks in rather than sitting on top, which is why the edges of a printed motif are soft. That softness is the tell of a hand.
We keep the house small on purpose.
A few weavers, a few dozen candles a week, and no season we have to chase. It means we sell less. It also means we know who made the thing you are holding, and can tell you their name.
See the collection