Day 191-192-A Quilter's Cupboard

If you are a master quilter, where will you store your delicate quilts with their embroidered mirror work and painstaking stitches?

This cupboard perhaps? A gift from Mercedes more than a year ago, it came with the Buddha for whom The Temple of Heaven was built. The cupboard is of the perfect length i.e. 4" and has a good height- 2" excluding the legs. It is so ideal that it does not really matter that none of the doors and drawers open, right?

Because all it takes is for one to say "Open Sesame" with a good chisel and lo and behold, one door opens as if by magic and it even creaks like something ancient. 

With the right colourss, one can even make it look like it sounds.  There are the exotic colours like Portrait Pink , Burnt Umber and Burnt Sienna and the ever reliable ones like Black and White. Don't forget to sand off the previous varnish and spray paint the base Brown first, of course.

It is not long before the transformation takes place. This time, thanks to the sanding, at least the cupboard does not look like it has been out in the rain for decades . Poetic though that about 2 seconds after the cupboard was out in the open for this picture, it started to drizzle. 

You can see that this cupboard is made mitchy matchy with the shrine because of the knobs and pullers.

Now, because my Banjaran women are also good with Indigo dying and mud resist block printing, there must be space in the cupboard for these creations as well. 

For those of you who are not sure how you can fit bales of indigo dyed and printed  materials in a tiny space, the trick is hair spray. Fold each bale and fasten with a pin and then spray and spray, front, back, everywhere UNTIL

they behave like rows of neat, not-a-hair-out-of-place children. Pile them on top of one another (I separated them in this picture because I was so fascinated with the single striped piece that look exactly like my real life dhurrie from India) and then tweezer their way into the cupboard.

This is a view that you cannot see in real life so I am making this picture extra large. 

Here is the very stingy real life view which sometimes make me wonder why I go to such lengths especially as half a can of hair spray was used up to make this possible. What about the quilts, you asked? 

Well, if they are truly magnificent masterpieces, then  I guess we should just pile them on top of the cupboard and proudly display them. See the basket of white cloth next to the cupboard? That's more material waiting to be indigo dyed.

Thank you, Flora for the basket of material and Ira for the curtain.

Postscript 

Picture from Wonderful Workshops Organisation 

I found this post in Once Upon a Tea Time on these wonderful workshops  on embroidery and indigo dying.  

 Picture from Wonderful Workshops Organisation 

Imagine 

having tea on a palace lawn in the pink city of Jaipur 

with masters and artisans imparting to you, secrets of the stitches of the deserts, 

making a trip to the local bazaars to source for materials and

gather inspiration from a fabulous 4 story haberdashery emporium 

that sells cottons and silk, mirrors, sequins, beads and ribbons, 

delving into old archives rich with traditional embroideries

gaining hands-on experience of the extensive range of decorative stitchery typical of the region

with the help of local embroidery ladies demonstrating their skills.

Or

 

understand the complexities of the mud resist process 

experiment with the magic of woodblock printing

and 

learn the ancient art of indigo dying

Picture from Wonderful Workshops Organisation 

I want. I really do.