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Most of the cloth that ends up in our homes — the sheets we sleep in, the cushions we read against, the napkin on a Sunday table — comes from a factory. It is printed by a machine, dyed in a tank, cut by a robot, sewn at a station. Most of it works perfectly well. It's just made to be identical.
Sutracraft is what happens when it isn't. We exist because there is a quieter alternative — slower, made by hand, and still worth choosing. Block printing has lived continuously in Sanganer and Bagru for centuries. The technique hasn't changed much: a karigar carves a design into a piece of teak wood, dips the block in dye, and presses it against cotton stretched on a long table. That's the whole craft. It looks simple. It takes years to do well, and a lifetime to do quickly.
We started Sutracraft to bring this work to homes outside India — homes in the UK, in the UAE, in Europe — where buyers are increasingly aware that the cloth in their lives could come from somewhere specific, made by someone specific, instead of from nowhere in particular. We are a small operation: one workshop in Jaipur, a handful of named karigars, an export side run from Mumbai. We make slowly. We print in small batches. We sell directly to you without a middleman taking a cut.
Sutracraft is run by two people in two cities. One in Jaipur, where the workshop is — where blocks are carved, dyes are mixed, and karigars print cotton on long wooden tables. One in Mumbai, where the export side operates — where the orders come in, the logistics are managed, and the emails get answered.
We are not karigars. Neither of us prints cloth. Our job is to make sure the cloth that gets printed in Sanganer ends up in the homes of people who will appreciate it, and to make sure the karigars who print it get paid above market rates for skilled work and credited by name. Both of those things sound obvious. Neither is, in this industry.
If you want to write to us, the address is hello@sutracraft.com. We read every email and reply to most within a working day.
Two towns, both in Rajasthan, both within an hour's drive of central Jaipur. They are not the same. They have different traditions, different colour palettes, different histories.
Sanganer is older — a town just south of Jaipur, where block printing has been continuously practised for over four hundred years. Sanganeri prints are usually fine, repeating patterns in soft colours: pale indigos, cream-on-white, faded madder. Most of the bedsheets and finer cottons in our catalogue are printed here. The water in Sanganer — alkaline, mineral-rich — is part of why the dyes set so well. Workshops have to be near rivers or wells with this specific water chemistry.
Bagru is smaller, drier, more rural — a village about thirty kilometres west of Jaipur. Bagru prints are typically bolder: deep indigo, strong madder reds, contrasting blacks. Bagru printing uses a "dabu" (mud-resist) technique for some patterns — a paste of clay and gum is painted onto the cloth before dyeing, leaving a pattern in the original cotton when the paste is washed off. Most of our two-tone and three-colour pieces come from Bagru.
Sutracraft is a small operation. We're not a venture-funded D2C startup, we're not a heritage brand with a hundred-year history, and we're not a marketing agency reselling someone else's craft. Here's how the business actually works.
Our printing partner in Jaipur is a family-run workshop with five generations of block printers. They print exclusively for us on the dates we book. We don't sell cloth that was printed for another brand and re-labelled — every piece on this site was printed for Sutracraft.
Woven in Tamil Nadu and Jaipur. Sourced through partners we've worked with for years. Standard cotton — no synthetics, no blends, no proprietary fabric names that turn out to be polycotton.
Reactive and pigment dyes, water-based for printing, plus natural dyes (indigo, madder, pomegranate) for our older pieces. If you have specific sensitivities, write to us before ordering.
We sell directly to you — no wholesalers, no agents, no middlemen marking up the price two or three times. The price you pay roughly reflects the cost of the cotton, the dyes, the labour of the karigars (paid above local market rates), the packaging, the international shipping, and a margin small enough that we can keep printing in small batches.
We print in small batches and ship in small batches. We don't have warehouses full of stock. If a piece is sold out, we'll print again — but it might take three or four weeks.
Every piece on this site is hand-printed, not screen-printed or machine-printed. If we ever introduce a machine-printed line, it will be clearly labelled and sold separately.
Where we can trace a piece to the specific karigar who printed it, we credit them by name on the product page. Where we can't (when a piece was printed across multiple printers in a batch), we say so honestly.
Every Sutracraft piece is 100% cotton unless it explicitly says otherwise. We don't slip synthetics into our blends to lower cost.
Kraft outer carton, cotton drawstring bag inside, paper tape, cotton twine, recycled tissue. No plastic anywhere — including the small things most brands miss like polybags and silica sachets.
We sell directly to you. The karigars in our workshop are paid above the Rajasthan market rate for skilled block-print work, with experienced printers earning more than newer ones.
We are working toward AZO-free dye certification, OEKO-TEX certification (for our Phase 2 brand), and full traceability for every SKU. Until we have those certifications in hand, we don't claim them.
If you want to see how the printing actually happens, the workshop is one click away. If you want to meet the people who do the work, their profiles are on Meet the Karigars. If you want to write to us, the address is hello@sutracraft.com. And if you want to start with a piece of cloth, the collection is here.