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r/SustainableFashion r/Hand_Embroidery
Image 1 — No frame, no printed pattern, no machine, just fingers counting threads. This is Toda embroidery.
Image 2 — No frame, no printed pattern, no machine, just fingers counting threads. This is Toda embroidery.
Image 3 — No frame, no printed pattern, no machine, just fingers counting threads. This is Toda embroidery.
▲ 29 r/Hand_Embroidery

No frame, no printed pattern, no machine, just fingers counting threads. This is Toda embroidery.

This is hand embroidery from the Nilgiri Hills in South India, made by women of the indigenous Toda community.

What you're looking at: the pattern isn't traced or printed onto the cloth. There's no frame holding it. The maker counts the individual threads of the weave with her fingers and builds the geometry from memory, which is why it comes out so precise it's fully reversible, with no "wrong side."

A shawl worked this way can take around three weeks. It's slow because there's no way to make it faster and still have it be this. Fewer than a few hundred women still do it.

u/nilgiri_thread — 5 days ago
▲ 42 r/SustainableFashion

Some hand embroidery takes weeks per piece and fewer than 400 people still make it. Would you actually pay what "slow" really costs?

Been thinking about where hand-craft fits into sustainable fashion.

There's an embroidery from the Nilgiri Hills in South India: Toda embroidery, where a single shawl can take around three weeks, counted thread by thread entirely by hand. No machine, no printed pattern. Fewer than 400 women still practise it.

The craft only survives if the makers are paid for the time it actually takes. Underpay it and the next generation doesn't pick it up, it quietly disappears. Machine-made copies at a fraction of the price make that worse.

So I'm curious where people here actually land: would you pay more for something made this slowly and properly, or has fast fashion priced this kind of work out of most people's reach for good? Where's your honest line?

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u/nilgiri_thread — 7 days ago