Confused by some of the Indian terms? Click here   for definitions of the techniques and products used by our artisans and craftspeople.

Welcome to the Indian Collection on-line catalogue. This catalogue is for our retail clients only. To browse our products, click on the categories above. Or read more about our business on this page.

Kimonos

We are a small and very specialist business offering a very exclusive range of handmade textile products for the home and person.

All of our products are made in the villages of India using skills and techniques handed down through generations of specialist family run businesses.

Our range includes products that are often difficult to find even in India itself and most of them do not exist anywhere else in Europe largely because the time and effort needed to find sources and produce such products is not commercially viable on a large enough scale. You have to love the product and the producers more than you love making money to work as we do.

We place huge importance on developing authentic regional designs and working with vegetable dyes wherever possible.

We work with natural fibres and employ family owned craft businesses with whom we have long-standing personal relationships. These conditions can create difficulties such as quality control and design and colour consistency. As we cannot be in India to check every consignment we work with four export businesses in India, whom we have known for years, who principles and objectives align with ours and who oversee the detailed work for us.

Throws
 

Table Cloths

Our products are all handmade and therefore there are limitations as to the consistency which is not experienced in machine produced textiles.

The dyes are all hand mixed and therefore colours can vary from batch to batch.

Sizes stated are approximate and do vary from item to item.

Designs are either woven, embroidered or block printed by hand so can vary slightly in each item though the differences are seldom detectable. Print detail is not always as clean as modern machine prints, block joints are noticeable, density of weaving can vary slightly and colour fastness is adequate rather than excellent.

Having tried to explain the limitations we believe that they are more than offset by the fact that every item is an individual piece of art produced with love and generations of skill.

Monsoons, assorted religious festivals, natural disasters and even cricket matches provide a variety of reasons for disrupting production schedules;

Combined with the fact that many of the processes are very laborious and complicated the start to finish of a production run can be very extended. We do our best to anticipate these known interruptions and are usually working at least a year in advance of you seeing products but……

For details on the various techniques please see our page on techniques.

Quilts

Cushion Covers
 

All our products are selected with specific objectives in mind

They must be ecologically as harmless as is possible

They must employ traditional production techniques and be produced without unacceptable work practices

There must be sufficient production capacity to satisfy commercial demand.

The Indian Collection was founded by Chris Turner and Jeremy Smith in 1991. Through our employment in the retail trade we can claim over 25 years of experience of trading in textiles in India and very special contacts in handweaving and handprinting.

The business was set up with the objectives of promoting the traditional crafts and natural materials used over the centuries and using these to produce a range of traditional and contemporary designs that were essentially Indian at the same time as being attractive to European taste.

Table Cloths