Design Initiatives in Craft
Wooden Cutlery Location: Udaigiri, Nellore District, Andhra Pradesh,India About 50 highly skilled and motivated women from the Muslim community and a few other older masters are engaged in hand carved wooden cutlery and hair clips embellished by Persian motiffs passed on from earlier times. Here the intervention though very basic but was of high value and need. We first initiated them into the use of measuring scale and the geometry box. With the installation of wood working machinery by the dept. of Handicrafts the need was to make them understand the idea of replication. These girls who left school half way are now, at least a few, familiar with the idea of one eight of inch or three forth of an inch. We familiarized them with contemporary dining spaces and objects through browsing magazines to help them get a feel of our thematic approach in creating newer flat ware. We introduced the concept of making sets for possible use as disposables by individual buyers or theme hotels/airways...