My big sister bought me a kantha quilt. , but I don’t know how to feel about it.
Here’s the thing, they are advertised as a fair trade item. Probably Indian or some other country like that.
I can see the situation:
Poor, single Mother of 5, one still at the breast.
She breast feeds her baby hands her off to the oldest child and goes trash picking.
Giant textile Mills dump excess fabric bolt ends and cast off clothes. She buys thread with her meager coins. More like cord than thread. She drags her self home. On the way she buys a pita stuffed with old meat and yellow rice. Brings it home to her hungry kids. She divides it up. She gets one end. And breast feeds the baby again.
After the meal she rinses the fabric and hangs it to dry.
Next day, same thing. When she’s sewn 3 kantha quilts, on her hands, she can sell them.
Kantha quilts are basically two patched pieces of fabric sewn together with rough hand sewing.
I love this quilt. I love the woman and her children who have sacrificed their time to make me one.
I feel guilty tho’. They are dirt cheap on sale online.
The woman probably got 2 dollars for 3 quilts and lots of her precious time.
Fair trade? Not sure I believe it’s fair.
I wish I could fix it. Alas, I cannot.
I hope she knows how much I love this ragged little quilt.
I’d never heard of them before your thread, so I looked them up. They are gorgeous. I found one site where the kantha’s are made by women getting out of domestic violence or sex trafficing situations, which sounds like a good thing to me.
I have no need for this, but I’m still thinking about it.
My understanding is they operate a sort of cooperative, founded on seed money from an aid organization. The women operate as independent craft people, piece work, but the seller provides the new materials and often, spaces for dying, printing, sewing, selling, shipping, processing payments etc.
I could be misremembering parts, I looked into it before I purchased such a quilt a few years back now.
I’m with your sister on this one, Beck. Your head is probably misleading you. There wouldn’t be any digging in a huge, stinky dump. India is the endpoint for millions of tons of used clothing from the US and UK. Some of it gets processed back into threads that are used in blankets for disaster victims (tsunamis, etc.). Some of it is repurposed.
I know you don’t trust fair trade, but I think in this case, it’s legit: the workers aren’t getting rich, but they’re paid a fair price for their work.
I stopped buying cashew milk and cashews a few years ago because the anacardic acid in the shells is so caustic, the women who shell them suffer and sometimes lose fingers. But I realized that I was also taking away business that allowed them to subsist. India is one of the leading producers of cashews. Buying those kantha quilts would be a better way of helping those women, so I may be buying some soon.
If you want to feel even better, you can donate to a charity that buys chickens, livestock, bees, etc. and provides guidance so women in third world countries can become small-scale farmers.
Thank you guys.
I looked into the group that’s working to help these women.
Their wages are so low as to cause me concern.
I do think the amount they pay may be a sort of living subsistence wage, where they live.
True enough these women count on this money to feed children and pay rent.
I’m feeling better about it.
I hope my sisters gifts have helped a few.
I will be looking for more fair trade items to buy. I hope I can help a few.
There’s a fair trade store near my church in suburban Chicago; my best friend buys from there a lot, and with her guidance, I’ve bought several gifts there, too. From what I’ve seen, their sourcing is all highly documented, and the income seems to make a real difference in the lives of the craftspeople.
As long as it’s enough to keep her from taking her child out of school to labour, in some form, it’s enough to change a family’s destiny. One educated child, can literally change everything, in India.
I’m not keen on that phrasing either. However, I do think they are using it to identify the style with those of the 60s and 70s, and don’t mean them as a put-down (which is exactly what it was back then).
“Bohemian” style has been all the rage for the last several years. It’s certainly not a put down, and the number of people who would perceive it to be one has to be very small (and confined to Boomers, maybe?).
@MoonMoon It was a big insult in the late 19th & early 20th century in the US and the use of such phrasing during the days of hippies, meant it as such as well, but it was a milder insult by that time. But, oh yeah, calling someone a Bohemian or Bohunk was fighting words from before my time on earth. Read history.
But still racist origins. Perhaps the marketing world isn’t up-to-date on how many feel about words with racist origins. I for one am well-aware of the marketing use, having spent time in the advertising world. But knowing my grandmother was repeatedly called this as a slur makes me, and others. sensitive to it.