The past seven weeks have sped me through the first levels, thankfully, gratefully...allowing me to be ready to think about extending myself...& where, ironically, does my first step take me? To the tailors! Fashion usually doesn't interest me, true. But rotating the same five tops does - feels far too much like the last seven weeks in maternity clothing, an experience I promised myself I would endure ever again.
You can always but ready-made here, even for women larger like me. Prices range from 1700-5000 INR for a sawar kameez set - pants, tunic & coordinated scarf. Choices are limited & even though Indian woman are shorter than I, the pants always need hemming, so I'm traipsing off to all these swank locations with my pants rolled up. (I look, & more importantly, feel, like a suitcase tourist. Not the mindset required to move towards self-actualization!)
There are hundreds of places to buy fabric sets...then you just need a tailor. The holidays - first Durja Puja & now Diwali - had tailors I'd been recommended working 24/7 on orders & then collapsing into long holidays away until the end of October. Not too helpful. Yet, I decided to head out to the stores I knew about & buy a few items so I'd be ready, have them washed & preshrunk, as soon as they returned.
I walked out the door, called for the taxi & looked across the street...there, standing with a tape measure around his neck was a man working cutting fabric on the workbench used by construction workers to sleep, eat, look over plans & play cards after their days work. Turning to Anita I asked, " Is that a tailor". She smiled. Pantomimes followed, lots of nodding affirmations & today, less than 24 hours later, I placed an order for three new outfits & had seven other pieces altered!
Not sure how the fabric I purchased will look when they are made into outfits...I shopped at a mall which holds hand crafts from each of the 27 states of India - one for each state - hoping to keep with my goal of buying only items which have a touch of culture in them vs. the modern items friends here buy. I don't want to look antiquated, so I found colors I saw in the stores, with similar embroidery or designs, but, because I was purchasing them from a government supported system for artisans, I could be assured they were being sold at a fair cost & that the workers would also see a fair share of the profits. It's nearly impossible to select your choices from stacks of literally hundreds of patterns and colors - in each store! The clerks are thankfully very knowledgeable about what they have in stock...give them a color or a wish and off they run to pull out five or six that meet the criteria. Better yet, for a solo, usually indecisive shopper like me, they also are quite willing to give their opinions, respectfully. Prices for enough fabric to make pants, long tunic & coordinating scarf ranged between 600 INR ($12) to 1500 INR ($30). The cost to sew or tailor is shockingly low - 50 cents US to hem pants or take in a kameez (long tunic) and no more than 200 INR (about $5) to sew the personalized sized set of pants, top & scarf. I was able to select how I wanted the trim placed on the sleeves, length of sleeves, type of sleeves, type of neckline, type of pant cut, way in which scarf would be wrapped, how I wanted the design to move on the scarf &, I think, though we were reaching the limit of our minimal sewer's vocabulary of English/Bengali mix, whether I wanted a hook put on the back to hang on a coat rack type piece of furniture most women hang their daily clothes on or for a coat hanger.
Eager to get delivery before November 1st!
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