Kasuti Archive Sweatshirt (Natural White)

A Return to our Roots - Natural Cotton Sweatshirt 

A Return to our Roots is an effort at embracing our land, protecting our ancestral skills, and going back to Mother Earth. The collection consists of wearable art pieces that aims to highlight the prominent crafts and skills of North Karnataka, as an ode to our roots, our hometown  🌼

The Kasuti Archive Sweatshirt is the first product (child) of this collection, a journey that began over a year ago 🥀 This "master copy" was created in an attempt to spread the language of Kasuti through the world, with a hope to relive the art, culture and history of our hometown - Dharwad, Karnataka and express our love for the stories of our ancestors told in the form of Kasuti ✨🌸 After wanting to bring this vision to life for 6 years, we finally started our journey in 2020, with a hope of bringing the world to Kasuti - a very new style of embroidery, that holds decades of knowledge, skills and strength 🛖Our approach to designing the sweatshirt was a direct efforts to create a visual book of patterns and colours that combined all the stories of Kasuti, written by our ancestor. We began to create an art work before it could be anything else. The garment visually also looks like a sketchbook of all the collected ancient motifs from our discoveries, along with words and sentences that we noted alongside the motifs to materialise the story we want to tell of returning to our hometown, and our roots 

Consciously created oversized sweatshirt with hand embroidered Kasuti motifs that celebrates an ancient art form that dates back to the 6th century native to North Karnataka 🛖🌞 

A product of Love - the Kasuti Archive sweatshirt was created as an effort to embrace our land, protect our ancestral skills and go back to Mother Earth🌍 The embroidery was co-created with artisans in Dharwad, our hometown in North Karnataka, crafted with the women of Sakhi Saphalya, a non- profit that works in partnership with skilled women from neighbouring villages to empower them with the Kasuti craft. The sweatshirt is lovingly made by our friends at Oshadi Collective, using purely organic Cotton jersey fabric, and stitched by the highly skilled garment workers and seamtresses of Erode, Tamil Nadu 

We designed this sweatshirt to be embraced by everybody keeping it gender-neutral and season-less🌻⛅️The fabric adapts to all weather types making it your favourite piece all through the year ☀️✨The garment naturally falls to appeal many body types made of cotton so gentle on the skin 🕊️ 

The sweatshirt holds an embroidery so ancient that has been using 6th century old embroidery motifs 🌞 As we revive the art of Kasuti, we wanted our collection pieces to celebrate these motifs (butta) that described the everyday lives of our ancestors from North Karnataka 🥀 The sweatshirt playfully takes us on a Kasuti journey reminding us of a time in Dharwad where peacocks roamed in our backyards, and the sky covered with trees 🧚🏾‍♀️🌷 It also has other imagery like a festive elephant, deers grazing a tree, a tulsi katti (pedestal), lanterns that we hung outside our homes, parrots and peacocks 🦚 ✨ All telling a story of our roots, our homeland, and our childhood ✨🦋 

We had to consciously create these pieces to enhance and uphold the unique individual quality each piece carries. Because it’s done by hand and how every artisan has her own story woven into what she stitches, which makes it a clothing to treasure 🌺🪡

Model is wearing S-M. 

Our artisans tirelessly work to create hand told embroidery on our sweatshirts 🧚🏾 Kindly allow them a minimum of 30 days for us to make your very special work of art. you might find slight variations in the pieces as each of them is one of a kind and handmade🌸

Made by No Borders in-house 🌷