An artisan lifting dyed fabric from a steaming vat in a Srinagar workshop

The Craft

From fibre to finished piece.

Every BAAF textile passes through the same specialists — spinner, weaver, dyer, embroiderer, finisher — before it leaves Srinagar.

Materials

Natural by choice — three fibres, worked by hand.

Pashmina

Raw fibre from the Changthang plateau, near the India–Tibet border. It enters the Kashmir craft ecosystem to be cleaned, carded and hand-spun in our Srinagar workshops before it's ever woven.

Wool

Sourced from Kashmir's own mountain sheep. Spun and woven for heavier textiles, throws and apparel where Pashmina's fineness isn't what the product calls for.

Silk

Used for warp strength, sheen and fine embroidery work, alongside Pashmina and wool. A natural fibre, worked the same way — by hand, in Srinagar.

Process

A piece moves through many hands before it's finished.

Not every product passes through every stage below — a plain-woven stole and an embroidered shawl take different paths. This is the fuller sequence.

Design & Pattern

For patterned and jacquard pieces, the design is first recorded as a talim — a hand-marked chart the weaver reads stitch by stitch. Traditional motifs and contemporary briefs are set down the same way.

An artisan hand-marking a woven pattern chart, or talim, on graph paper

Card & Spin

Raw fibre is carded to align and clean it, then hand-spun into yarn on a traditional spindle. This stage alone can take a spinner years to master.

Hands carding raw pashmina fibre with a wooden card

Warp & Weave

The loom is dressed — warp threads set and tensioned — before weaving begins. On a handloom, the weaver drives the shuttle and beats the weft by hand, row by row.

A weaver's hand guiding warp threads through a loom's reed

Dye

Yarn or woven cloth is dyed by hand over wood-fired vats, in small batches, colour matched by eye and experience rather than a fixed formula.

Artisans dyeing yarn in a workshop, steam rising and skeins of colour hanging to dry

Embroider, Finish & Inspect

Embroidery and block-printing are done by specialists working on cloth that's already been spun and woven by someone else. The piece is then finished, cleaned and inspected before it moves to packing.

An artisan hand block-printing a pattern onto finished fabric

An artisan hand-spinning pashmina fibre onto a traditional spindle, seated on a red carpet

Handloom vs. power-loom

We tell you which is which.

Kashmiri craft is often sold under a single, generic 'handmade' label. We don't do that — the two production methods serve different products, and a buyer deciding what to specify should know exactly what they're getting.

Handloom

Fine Pashmina, shawls, stoles, carpets

Hand-spun where the product calls for it, woven by hand on treadle looms, embroidered by hand where specified. This is the traditional core of the workshop — more than eighty handlooms across our network, run by weavers who trained on them for years.

Power-loom

Contemporary apparel & selected prêt

For jackets, Bandi jackets, Pashmina jackets and other contemporary apparel, we use power-looms where they suit the product — cut, finished and quality-checked by hand. We'll always be specific about which parts of a product are power-loomed.

See what these processes produce.

From fine handwoven Pashmina to power-loomed apparel — browse what we make, or bring us something that isn't on the list yet.

What We Make Custom Manufacturing