Kantha Embroidery

Kantha is an age-old tradition of creating patchwork fabric through the stitching of discarded cloth, a practice that emerged from the resourcefulness of rural women in the Bengali region of the Indian subcontinent, which encompasses today's eastern Indian states of West Bengal and Orissa, as well as Bangladesh. As one of India's oldest forms of embroidery, its roots can be traced back to a time preceding the Vedic era, prior to 1500 BCE. The term "Kantha" encompasses both the style of the running stitch and the finished fabric. In this context, we were assigned the task of crafting diaries with book covers adorned in Kantha embroidery.