Harijan bag

This beautiful bag caught my eye as an old harijan woman displayed it in her wares under a huge shady tree in the middle of her dusty village. The stitches are very fine, but the two sides of the bag appear to have been embroidered by two different people. The peacock's body and tail are different as are the shapes of the smaller birds (parrots?). On one side the stitching hides almost all of the drawings but drawings on the other side are easily seen all over the place. The thing that is most interesting is the words. It is Gujarati. One side has nearly perfect textbook letters while the other has squiggly and hard to read letters, as though the embroiderer didn't truly understand what they were stitching.

The well-formed Gujarati letters shown above and the rough ones are below.

The entire bag is handstitched and has a lining that the embroidery is stitched through so that the back of the stitching can be seen on the inside of the bag. The triangles were sewn with the seams and then a very loose running stitch was used to stitch the outsides of the seams. A zipper is hand sewn in the top and a garish, modern machine-made band was used for the strap, again handsewn to the bag.

A shot of the interior of the bag with the stitching through the lining fabric.

A very fine chain stitch is the main embroidery stitch used to create and decorate the motifs. All the motifs are then outlined with backstitch in white. The Gujarati text is also stitched with chain stitch. The mirrors are worked with cretan stitch.Here is a horrible picture of the lady who sold the bag with the bag lying in front. I apologize for the quality of the picture, this was a few years ago with a not-nice camera and a very bad photographer (me).

Baby Toy

In a tiny Rabari village of round houses on the coast of Gujarat we purchased this baby toy. It is perhaps supposed to be a parrot, though that is just a guess based on other triangular type motifs that are labeled as parrots in some of my research books. Typical of Rabari "stuffed" objects, it is very stout and heavy. The stuffing is tightly rolled fabric sewn into the desired shape then covered with the decorative outer layer. We were informed by our guide, and the gestures of the Rabari woman who sold it to us, that it was a baby toy similar to a mobile.

The stitches:

The yellow lines are Chain Stitch.

The white squares are Back Stitch.

Yellow and orange square and rectangles are in Satin Stitch.

The mirrors are held on with an incredibly tight Cretan stitch and surrounded by white Running stitches. Two of the mirror on the top of the triangle have cut through the stitches on one or both sides.

The white zigzag holds the triangle together down both sides and tiny tassles of orange and yellow have been sewn to all three corners.