Thrift store treasure : sari ……… maybe

Living in India gave me the experience of wearing a sari and this has influenced my practice of clothing as architecture housing the body ever since.

I thought this length of fabric was a sari when I came across it in a local thrift shop so it had double appeal.  ($8.50 Cnd :  I like it when people tell me how much they pay for such things) 

It feels like silk, has that slight drag across my thumb but my hands are a bit winter rough at the moment and I am not 100% sure it is pure silk.  It certainly drapes and intensifies like silk….hmmmmm.  For some reason I have a doubt.  Perhaps it is of a silk of a sort of which I am unfamiliar in a sari.  Perhaps it is not a sari.

It has been valued or treasured because there are a number of fine darns as you can see in the photo;  you have to search to find them, they are that well done.  And people only do this when they feel they have something worthwhile.

It is the conventional width for a sari but the length is more than six feet and saris are usually either five or six feet;  they may vary a bit in width to accommodate a child but I have never known one to be longer: they don't need to be – they are wound around the body and pleated so adjust to all shapes which is part of their charm. 

Another thing – all the saris I have known had a border only at one end and this has a border at both ends.  There is no need to have a border at both ends because you tuck one end into the waistband of your slip and this is never seen; it is the other end that is draped over the shoulder and 'on show'.

So this is a lovely mystery I may never know the answer to but it is fun to wonder.

The increased length has me also wondering about doing a few pleats in the usual way which lie across the stomach and provide the drape and ease for walking and then continuing to form pleats in a single file across the left hip before gathering the last of the fabric into folds, curving across the back, then across the front and laying over the left shoulder to hang down the back.

I never mastered the technique but it is fascinating to watch a woman putting on a sari spread her hand with fingers wide and weave the fabric back and forth between thumb and little finger to make a panel of neat pleats.