Chennai :
More than 650 students from schools across the city were teaming in the Cooptex grounds on Wednesday to witness something they’ve never had a chance to. A small wall was erected to display the range of indigenous hand-woven sarees that were made by weavers across the State. Silk and cotton Jarigai’s of all patterns, splashed with colours and textures, invaded the space.
But what grabbed all the eyes was the group of weavers who had come from Kancheepuram to give students an experience of seeing weaving done live. Cooptex jumped into the spirit of Daan Utsav for the first time by facilitating this event for students. The two-day festival called ‘Weaving the Handloom Tale’ is a mini-replica of everything you’d find at a traditional silk weaver’s home. Some of them who had turned up have been in the business for generations.
Armed with a spinning wheel, warp machine and metres of silk threads, the group of six weavers demonstrated how silk threads were processed and woven. A small table in the front had a batch of moldy-looking mini egg-sized silk cocoons. Next to it, yarns of coloured silk, warped and weft, as its called, were laid out in bright eye-catching colours of pink, white and blue for everyone to look and get a feel of.
“The students were fascinated by these cocoons. You can even hear the sound of silkworms when you shake them,” says Sukanya, a volunteer of Daan Utsav. “The weavers work almost 8-10 hours everyday. They need about eight days to make a single silk saree.”
The weavers were undoubtedly the stars of the day. They explained how the set-up worked to the endless stream of curious onlookers. All those who were assembled at the event, right from the toddlers from Euro kids, to the 8-12 year olds from Don Bosco Matriculation and even the students from Madras Institute of Fashion Technology students, who whipped out their phones to click pictures, were amazed at the skill and craft of the weaver’s.
“One child even asked me if the spinning wheel was invented by Gandhiji,” chuckles Thiruvengadam, who has been weaving silk for decades. At the behest of Cooptex, he was here to exhibit the trade for young learners.
His wife sits barely a feet few away helping him spin the yarn or parittam, where she spun almost 50 grams worth of silk onto a small cylindrical wood structure. This is fed into the spinning wheel, which later goes into the warping device. “There are two kinds of yarns for any weaving — warp and weft. One makes horizontally woven threads while the other makes vertical threads. It is the basic format in which all weaving is done,” explains Balasubramaniam, general manager of Cooptex.
The event, which was planned along the lines of ‘giving’, received a fine response from students, who got a sneak peak into the weavers trade for the first-time. To the weavers who had given their time to be here, the students presented colourful hand-made cards with wishes and thank you’s. “We are glad to tell people about how our trade works. We hope more people will be interested in buying weaver-made silk,” smiles Ganapathy, who has been weaving since he was six.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Cities> Chennai / by Express News Service / October 08th, 2015