Our story

EST. 2010 · SANGANER, JAIPUR

Seventeen families,four hundred yearsof the same craft.

Threads & Knots exists to keep hand-block printing alive as a living trade — not a museum piece. Every quilt, sheet and napkin we sell is printed by hand, on pure cotton, by artisans we know by name.

HOW IT STARTED

One bolt of indigo cotton,and a week I didn’t plan for.

I went to Bagru in 2018 to buy fabric for my own home. I stayed nine days. What I found wasn’t a factory — it was a courtyard, a family, and a rhythm that hadn’t changed in generations: cloth washed at dawn, blocks cut by hand, dye vats fed and watched like sourdough.

I also found out how fragile it was. The younger printers were leaving for the cities. Wholesale buyers wanted the look, not the labour — and paid for the look. Machine-printed “block print” was undercutting the real thing in every market in India.

Threads & Knots started as a simple bet: that if the work is genuinely good, and the story is told honestly, people will pay what a hand-printed metre actually costs. Seven years and seventeen artisan families later, that bet is still holding.

Anjali

FOUNDER

Process · Carving the block

01

Carving the block

A single teak block takes a carver three to five days. Each colour in a print needs its own block.

Process · Preparing the cloth

02

Preparing the cloth

Cotton is washed, sun-bleached and beaten to open the weave so it takes dye evenly.

Process · Printing by hand

03

Printing by hand

The printer aligns and strikes the block by eye — several hundred times per metre. Small variations stay in.

Process · Fixing and washing

04

Fixing and washing

Dyes are fixed, then the cloth is river-washed and dried flat in the sun before it is cut and stitched.

WHAT SUSTAINABLE MEANS HERE

Three promises, plainly put.

Natural dyes, low water

Indigo, madder root, pomegranate rind, iron. Our Bagru partners run a closed-loop wash system — the water that leaves is cleaner than the water that arrives.