New Collaboration with Fabriclore - A Sewing Blog Series

In this post, I talk about this new exciting collaboration with an Indian fabric company and the blog series that is upcoming #thehemlineeclectic #fabriclorecollaboration #fabriclore

If you have been following my journey, you will already know the love I have for Indian textiles. I gravitate towards ikats, block prints and simple warp and weft fabrics all the time. I grew up draping sarees on myself and have had the wonderful opportunity to watch hand weavers in their home. I was born and raised in India and moved away for graduate school.

Here are some pictures taken when my husband and I went shopping of our wedding sarees in Kancheepuram, a silk weaving town in south India. These are silk sarees are hand woven. Weaving 6 yards (usual yardage of a saree) takes them about 20-25days.

Over the past few months I have had wonderful opportunities to collaborate with different fabric companies in the US (Sewing Studio and LA Finch Fabrics) and the UK (Minerva), and with wonderful pattern and fabric designers for pattern testing and to promote their patterns and fabrics on social media. This has further inspired me to be more involved with the home sewing community worldwide. This sparked the idea of reaching out to Indian fabric companies to see their interest in collaborating with home sewists as myself.

There are so many Indian fabric companies but very few with a good online presence and an e-commerce platform. Fabriclore is an exclusively online fabric company that is not only innovative in their designs but also aware of the sustainability of textiles. I was very impressed with their collection and reached out to them expressing my interest in collaborating.

After some wonderful conversations with the lovely people at Fabriclore, this blog series was born.

The Blog Series

This blog series is aimed at inspiring people to sew your own garments. I do not teach how to use a sewing machine, so this is for people who already know how to use one. I introduce you to Indie sewing patterns and some free resources to help you start sewing garments. Most of these resources are what I used to teach myself. Importantly, this is a way to showcase the lovely Fabriclore collection as unique garments that are hand sewn. I love the idea of taking indie sewing patterns and making them in Indian textiles.

The India that I knew growing up does not sew at home. Almost every neighborhood has a tailor's shop where they make made to measure garments. But the kind of garments usually made are limiting. Most people have made to measure blouses done to wear with their sarees. We also get kurthas or tunics and rarely skirts and pants made.

These garments are not made from any pattern per se, the tailor is skilled at cutting the fabric with just the client's measurements. Since the designs are pretty straight forward, the fitting would be pretty simple. With the fast fashion industry also setting up shops in India, the need for these tailors are also dwindling.

There are some. very exclusive designers that will make different styles of garments for a customer, but they are few and far between and not financially accessible for a large part of the population.

India is hugely growing economy. It has the largest population of young people in the whole world. This emerging generation is immersed in social media and have access to information like no other previous generation. This already lifts several barriers. I would like to inspire this generation of people to make their own garments, explore their own style through sewing and introduce sustainable and stylish wardrobe choices. Through this blog series, we hope we can reach them and give them access to information that they may not know exists.

The series will be 3 blog posts per month for 3 months to begin with. Depending on feedback and interest, we could decide to continue. I plan to start the series with some very simple patterns and we can increase the complexity of the pattern and fitting as we go along. I also plan to hack the patterns to show you how you can get more out of the same pattern and also introduce you to a vast resource of free patterns to play with.

For the first post, I chose the Ashton Top by Helen's Closet Pattern

Here is a sneak peak!