A Short Course on Kasuti Embroidery

Last month, Neeldhara Misra, Professor of Computer Science at IIT Gandhinagar, visited and spent some time looking through our embroidered pieces. She picked up a diary with a kasuti motif, one of our first products using this technique, and I found myself explaining why I’m drawn to it. Kasuti follows a set of rules that make each design feel like a puzzle. The “dots” (in reality, small dashes) must be connected in a particular order. Finding that order, figuring out the path, is where the work lies, and also where the satisfaction comes from.

She asked if I would be interested in offering a short course at IIT Gandhinagar on the subject, and I said yes. With the semester coming to a close, she quickly put things in motion so students could sign up. That is how Poems and Pixels: A Translation in Thread came about.

We began with the foundational stitches, spending time in repetition before moving on to motifs. Something lovely would happen occasionally. Every time someone figured out a pattern, their expression would shift. A small moment of clarity, followed by a bright smile.

One of the most meaningful parts for me was witnessing persistence. The careful working through of a design. Multiple versions sketched out on graph paper. Each line reconsidered, every move evaluated, guided by a quiet sense that “something is not quite right”. The steady effort to understand the order, and the movement of needle and thread required to bring it together. 

Some participants went on to create their own designs. Watching something new emerge, often inspired by something ordinary like a lizard, a flower, a beetle, a bird, or a frog, felt truly awesome.

Oh and in an extension of this idea, Neeldhara also created a digital tool where you can experiment with patterns, trace the order, and work through the logic of the stitch.