BANARAS #3

Hey everyone🙋

Shopping and me are never apart so I enjoyed shopping for some authentic benarasi brocades,Sarees..

Benares is famous for its pure silk sarees..

The sarees are among the finest sarees in India and are known for their gold and silver brocade or zari, finely woven silk and magnificent embroidery with intricate designs, because of these engravings, these sarees are relatively heavy..

A craftsman displaying the delicate embroidery work

Working away on the embroidery of the neck design of a salwar suit

Depending on the intricacy of the designs and patterns, a saree can take anywhere from 15 days to a month and sometimes up to six months to be completed..

Check out the delicate outline..as he goes around the design with a blue thread to highlight it..

Each bead is being stitched individually on the cloth…

Banarasi sarees are mostly worn by Indian women on important occasions such as their own wedding or while attending a wedding.

You will find lanes filled with weavers, where you get to see pure banarasi sarees been made..Though I did not go inside..I was happy checking out the names of the shops as I passed by on a cycle rickshaw..some are really really old ..

As powerlooms are taking over the textile industry, handlooms are getting affected..The powerlooms sarees are easier to manufacture,it’s easy to produce them in bulk and hence the cost is also very less compared to handloom sarees which most of the time are hand made, as I said some of them take months to be made, hence are priced very high but are of the purest form..

I was lucky enough to get my hands onto one such saree..