Reverse applique technique is skilled craft of hand-stitching fabrics together to create dimensional designs on a background fabric.
1. Design Tracing- An actual-sized drawing of the design is transferred on to a large piece of tracing paper. Tracing paper is placed on top of the design and the design is traced out. Holes are pierced on the tracing paper along the design and water erasable ink is used along the dotted line to transfer the design on to the fabric.
2. Cutting- This includes cutting of the design on the fabric which is done using chisel and hammer. For each design motif, the chisel is hammered to pierce-cut the cloth!
3. Pasting-After the whole fabric is cut in design through chisel it is spread and a foundation (lighter) cloth (organdy) is pasted above the cambric cotton with help of GAWAR vegetable glue. It is then dried and send to field.
4. EMBROIDERY-A vehicle from GVCS goes to clusters in a fortnight approximately. They carry all the raw pieces along with threads to the remote artisan’s cluster, where all the women choose the kind of cloth and design they want to work upon.
For each pattern artisan uses its experience and accordingly folds the thick cloth along the cut edge and hems it on the pasted underlying organdy cloth. Corners are made sharp and edges smoothed. This creates beautiful sheer pattern making the foundation cloth visible with an interplay of light and dark fabric.
All the women artisans have been given individual pass book, wherein their details like name, husbands/fathers name; address etc is mentioned along with their passport size picture. This passbook is used to maintain and streamline the log of work given and submitted and the money remitted to them for the work. GVCS also maintains a log of work given in a separate log book along with the quality of work done. Entries are made in both log book and artisans pass book for all the material exchange and money disbursal.
5. DYEING- These embroidered pieces are collected and washed for cleaning out any dirt and send to the dyers for dying in required colors. Organdy/Foundation cloth appears darker as compared to the overlying cambric which gives sense of depth and uniqueness to the fabric. It then undergoes Quality check. The product is given final finishing touches. Any extra threads are cut, and edges smoothed. It is then ironed, packaged and stored.
