Thread by @meenakshisharan

What you must know about a #Pashmina shawl before spending a fortune to acquire one!
This special breed of goats from high altitudes of Himalayas, have a double fleece, a fine & soft undercoat of hair, mingled with straighter, much coarser outer coating of hair.

Each goat sheds its winter coat, from which the usable #Pashmina fiber is 80 to 150gm only. It’s extremely delicate & is about 12-13.5 microns thin & for this very reason it can be only hand spun. Whereas the Pashmina products available today are 99% made from machine made thread

The fiber is then separated from the coarse hair & washed to be spun into thread.
Only skilled hands can spin the delicate #Pashmina fibre. One artisan can spin just 20 grams/ day, meaning 15-20 days of spinning will get yarn needed for one shawl.
*Pictures of my karigars.

*If put against light, if the shawl doesn’t reflect irregular yarn( charkha marks) means its not made from pure #Pashmina fiber!

The yarn is then transferred on to 4-6 iron rods dug in the ground as per needed shawl length warp= ताना
& then rolled onto a wooden beam.

Warp is then threaded through the healds in specific pattern depending on shawl, plain weave or diamond/ cheshm-e-bulbul or twill or herringbone/ machli gond etc & then (hand) woven into shawls, Stoles, Scarves, Mufflers etc. Weaving a 2 metre plain shawl takes minimum 3-4 days.

Then come the hand twisted fringes, dying with natural dyes, finishing & then the embroidery, which again is a lot of details..

Commercially produced ‘fake’ #Pashmina obtains its soft texture by chemical processes.

Check it against light- symitrical looking weave=machine made!

They’ll sell you fake #Pashmina calling it 50/50, 40/60 = pashmina mixed with staple, silk…& ring test kind of crap!
Pashmina will either be 100% or 0% because the fragile fiber can’t withstand power loom!

More later, exposing pheriwala & handloom exhibition Kasmiris stalls.