Growing up in a mofussil town has its advantages. A languid lifestyle, devoid of all distraction, helps you discover your latent faculties and widens your creative horizons in ways a metropolis can only aspire to.
As a teenager, I loved sticking my finger into every hobby pie. Sewing. Crochet. Macrame. Carpet Weaving. Typing. Singing. Painting. Strumming the guitar too.
Many a lazy winter afternoon when mom and her friends squatted on rickety charpoys knitting laughter, color, gossip, and yarn into captivating mufflers and sweaters, I’d plonk myself amidst the flock and pester them to share their craft with me.
The women often frowned at me in mock chagrin but eventually succumbed to my adamant pleas laced with transparent enthusiasm.
The Pupating Stage…
My salad days spanned a romance with stitch-enablers galore. The reed-thin sewing needle. The rotund embroidery needle. The fat ass knitting needle. The swan-necked latch needle. Every needle, except perhaps a doctor’s!
I spent the entire 70s doing rotten embroidery. Five bizarre bedspreads. Eight tedious table covers. Three ridiculous rugs.
Most of my initial creations were obnoxious, to say the least, and kitsch at best. I still cringe at some gems of this grotesquely.
But my mom collected them with the zeal of a hoarder and displayed them with pride in our ancestral home. To her, they were reminiscent of our congenital connect – those years spent on the peephole-studded charpoy.
The Butterfly emerges…
Learning hiccups over, the 80s saw me cruising along the now-familiar handicraft waters.
I was ideating in prolific proportions and creating quaint handicraft pieces which were expeditiously lapped up by friends and relatives.
Meanwhile, a family posting to a small town in Punjab gave me more time at hand. I used my vacant hours to visit a neighborhood library that was studded with some amazing books on hobbies such as crochet and petit point.
I devoured every single book to get an in-depth understanding of these crafts and their nuances.
I also developed humungous stamina to practice my hobby for hours at length, sometimes even overnight!
Soon after my first baby happened, we shifted base to Delhi. Here I started crocheting sweaters for toddlers at a pace so frenetic, I could churn out one sweater a day!
Within one year I had created enough stock to hold my first exhibition. This exhibition, a complete sellout, proved to be a huge morale booster for me.
The next logical step was to go commercial with my hobby.
So I set up a mini-enterprise that comprised a network of women adept at crochet and embroidery.
My handmade kiddy sweaters were soon rubbing shoulders with some of the leading brands in the business.
However, once I relocated to Chandigarh, I got involved as a ‘creative Stepney’ in the family’s advertising business and my passion for embroidery was once again relegated to a hobby.
In my spare time, however, I voraciously embroidered every ‘painted canvas’ I could lay my hands on.
The Eureka Moment…
Sometime in the early 90s, my regular wool supplier’s massive consignment fell victim to a short-circuit.
In a flash, seamless yards of yarn were reduced to 2 ft long shreds singed at both ends. The dejected shopkeeper implored me to get the albatross off his back.
As they say, one man’s garbage is another’s treasure.
The sight of a whole shop pregnant with colorful scrap turned out to be my eureka moment.
It inspired me to switch from the cumbersome cross-stitch using multiple skeins, to the time-saving petit point using a single strand of wool.
I also realized that prosaic painted canvas (depicting mundane horses and slovenly sceneries) wasn’t tickling my pituitary gland anymore.
I itched to do something more intricate and complex.
It was clear that if I had to take my hobby to the next level, I would have to revisit my style of embroidery. Maybe paint my own canvas.
So I set out to explore various media for subjects that would fire my imagination and soon discovered that portraits of rural Rajasthani men, with their expressive eyes and strong jawlines, challenged my creative muscles the most.
Making use of my professional designing skills, I digitally modified backdrops of my subjects and added my own design elements.
Next, using freehand, I sketched and then painted those portraits on canvas, thus creating my original painted canvas.
Finally, using needlepoint/petit point forms of embroidery, I was able to create intricate handmade tapestries.
It was fun laboring endlessly over minute details to get my protagonists’ expressions right.
Creating these handmade tapestries not only fulfilled my creative urges but also got me oodles of compliments from friends.
Today I have a gallimaufry of over hundred-odd tapestries, each of which is steeped in nostalgia for me.
And now, I’d like to imagine, my house looks closer to an art gallery than a grotesquery!
—Puja Bhakoo, author, MOOD SWINGS
