Changing Women's Lives with I was a Sari

At the end of August, I was a Sari participated in our first solo show at Lakmé fashion week, during the preparation of this we explored the use of fabric manipulation on our products for the first time. We showcased new strap sandals with fringes and gathers, as well as adding 3D effects to bags and pleats throughout the collection.

Since the success of the show, I was a Sari have carried on experimenting more in fabric manipulation and have been finalising the techniques brought into our collection. Now that we have hired a professional embroidery karigar in house he is able to finalise the samples and then teach the artisans how to do these new skills. It has been a real benefit to the embroidery training program having him on board as he can really spend time teaching and guiding the women through the techniques.

Bringing fabric manipulation into the IWAS collection not only means we are teaching another new skill to the artisans but we are also able to use more of what we already have (lots of saris!) while still adding value and a higher quality to the products.

In order for the embroidery project to create further impact, we have been creating educational training videos and contents to be shared on the learning platform, Udemy.com. This will be freely available to those who subscribe to our usage code of conduct and that accept to use the course only for non-commercial and socially inclusive purposes. The platform will be an easy and effective way to interact with our partners and will allow hundreds of more artisans to learn embroidery as a vocational skill.

The program will comprise of training videos to give a background and foundation explanation to embroidery. This will include both aari and zardozi techniques as well as the essentials such as frame set up and design placement.

Last month we spent a week with our partners filming the embroidery training videos. It was hard work but now that we are in the post-production stage we can see that the quality of these videos is high and we are looking forward to seeing the course once it’s finished.

We are continuing to work on the training material internally and are putting together teaching notes and samplers for the trainees to practice on alongside watching the videos as part of the curricular.

We also filmed some of our current embroidery artisans to ask them how they have overcome some of the challenges they might have faced before starting the embroidery programme. We will put these in the training videos to encourage and motivate the new artisans who might be finding the new skills a little daunting.

Having reached out to women who are interested in joining our embroidery project we will have a new batch of artisans ready to learn once the training program is ready!