Day Five

We are coming to the end of our first week of training with the beautiful ladies here, and we leave for Bangalore on the bus tomorrow afternoon.  Leaving them with the tools and some materials to practising their new-found skills.

Day Three was spent making a pair of dangly cluster earrings. The ladies made the entire earring including the earring hooks, and then chose beads to attach.  They are not a fan of the silver coloured wire that they are working with - they think it only suits white skin! All their jewellery is gold (or gold coloured)…except their toe rings.  The Hindu women wear rings on both feet, and a long gold chain (or gold coloured thread) with thalis on the end - both symbolise that they are married.  It is really interesting working with women from a culture that attaches such importance – both symbolic & aesthetic – to jewellery.

Day Four, yesterday, was lots of preparation for when we leave, with instructions on what they are to make whilst we are away…these have been left in the form of some translation through Prior (one of the ladies here that speaks pretty good English) & badly drawn diagrams with number codes attached to all the tools!

It’s was very hot here yesterday despite the fans in the production unit.  The ladies seem unaffected (unlike us!) and everyone has been working hard and enthusiastically.

There is a lot of work to be done sourcing raw materials, building links & putting the structure of how production will work when we are back in the UK into place whilst we are here in India.   We are hoping to source more materials in Bangalore this weekend, & find a link to buying silver at trade prices – proving pretty difficult as people don’t want to divulge where they are getting their materials from, understandably I suppose but fingers crossed we will get a break through.  In any case we are really looking forward to exploring the colourful markets again…and eager to do a little shopping!

We have been taking rather a lot of photographs so we will try to make a slide show of them this evening from the week so you can see more of the ladies & the beautiful things they have been making.

Thinking of you all, with love,

xxx