Where the Thread Took Me by Adithi Iyer

The first time I held a needle and did embroidery was in grade 7, in our needlework class at school. I remember being excited about it through the week. Around the same time, I started finding mathematics super interesting. I was not perfect in it either, but the process in both made me smile each time. As I moved closer to the board exams, one became a hobby and the other became something I chose to pursue. With time, mathematics became central, and embroidery stopped.

It came back after a long time through an email about a short course on Kasuti embroidery. I opened google and searched, what this art was all about. One look at it and I registered for it. Somehow, it felt that I would not need to remember too many steps, and knots, and still be involved in a very cool process. Once I registered, I got so excited that the next day, I went to Kudasan to get all the materials. The ones that were not available, went immediately to the Amazon cart and were ordered. And so, a week later, I was all set for the course.

The day the course started, it was Vishu, and the whole campus was full of Kani Poo (Amaltas). Yellow and hanging in full boom. In the class, Priyam introduced us to Kasuti embroidery and its two important rules “Stop where you start and never go over a line twice ”. She gave us some extremely pretty patterns and then all I remember after that was that, it was 8:15pm and we had to leave. I am generally aware of who is doing what, what is happening at the next table, but on that day, it was just me, the threads and the needle. 

In the next class, we continued with the patterns, but my mind did not stay only with the thread and fabric. It kept asking questions: where do I begin in a pattern, which path do I take, can I go all the way along a border and then return? The only way to answer, Priyam suggested, was to try. So I did. I made mistakes, paused, looked at them, and tried again. Slowly, I began to understand, in my own way, why some movements worked and why some did not. It felt like finding small answers with my own hands.

After the practice, Priyam told us that we would create our own motifs and asked us to start thinking about them. That thought stayed with me as I walked back. I looked at the yellow blooms and something settled in my mind, my first idea. A little later, I saw a lizard catching a bug, and two more ideas followed. The next morning, I saw a hornbill, and at that moment, I knew one more thing I wanted embroidered in Kasuti. During the class, where we started making motifs, and mistakes which I enjoyed making, we were asked to suggest ‘a motif’, I had more than one in mind, and all made their way on the board. We were then asked to think about how these motifs would take form in Kasuti over the weekend. 

That night, when I would usually be half asleep, I stayed with my graphs. I kept drawing, trying to see how my ideas would change when they became part of a grid. I began with the leaves of the Amaltas. I traced the series of leaves onto grid paper and followed the direction of each line, watching how the form shifted as it turned into something I could stitch. I played with different kinds of leaves that could be possible and then picked my favourites.

Making Kasutis of Amaltas leaves

Next were the flowers. Five petals felt like too much, so I tried a three-petal flower. I kept drawing, erasing, and pixelating. I had a rough flower, but once I noticed that it was breaking the grid boundaries, I changed it into two different stages of the flower. I could see a fully bloomed flower and a newly blossoming one in the motifs. I remembered that the Amaltas also had small buds, and I made a version of them. Then, in a small grid notebook, I made my first drafts of the motifs.

Trying to divide the grid into petals, and then landing to four petal flowers

Final flowers

After that, I worked on how these three motifs would come together in a long bunch to form a complete design. I worked with spacing and their continuity.        

Arranging the flowers

After this, I worked on my bug, the small stink bug. It made me think about how to create sharp edges without making it too large. I realised it was a combination of straight and diagonal stitches.  

The next day, I woke up a little unsure, but ready to make my hornbill. I repeated the same process, I traced and drew the outline of the bird and its horn, and then began to pixelate it. While doing this, I was taken back to my first day away from home in a hostel. I I remember looking out of a small window and seeing a grey bird, with what looked like two beaks and red eyes, eating mulberries. For a moment, I thought I had discovered a dinosaur. The next day, I went to college and joined a bird-watching group. I described the bird, and that is how I now know what a hornbill looks like.

Now, as I work on this, I am hoping to turn that memory into a Kasuti motif, something I can wear, something that reminds me to observe and to feel that same sense of excitement for the many small things I pass by.

The hornbill I saw and the one I am trying to make.

Bio: Adithi is currently pursuing her PhD at IIT Gandhinagar in the field of Education Design.