Hand-Wovens & Crafts

Our place, Hand-Wovens & Crafts, is located on Vutukuri Vari Veedi in Akulamannadu Palem. We are in the Guduru mandal of Krishna district, specifically in the Pedana area near Machilipatnam. It’s a long address but once you get into the lane, it’s easy to spot us. The whole neighborhood has the sound of looms going from early in the morning. We work with a lot of different threads and fabrics. The tables are usually covered in piles of cloth that are waiting to be worked on. I spend a lot of my day checking the patterns and making sure everything looks right. The air here often smells like the dyes we use. It’s a lot of manual work and my hands are usually a bit stained by the end of the day. The shop isn't very big, so we have to store a lot of the finished crafts in boxes stacked against the back wall. We have a small porch where we sit during the lunch break. Pedana is known for this kind of work, so we fit right in with the other artisans nearby. Sometimes tourists wander down our street looking for specific prints, and we show them what we have on the racks. It’s not a fancy showroom, just a working space where things get made by hand. We keep the doors open to let the breeze in from the coast, which helps when the summer heat gets heavy.