How a piece is made, start to finish

People ask fairly often what “handmade” actually means here, beyond the label. So here's the honest version, step by step.

Choosing the yarn

It starts with yarn, not with an order. Maa keeps a small stock of the colours and weights she uses most, bought a few times a year from the same two wholesalers in Karol Bagh she's shopped at for years — cotton for anything that touches skin, cotton-acrylic blends for bags that need to hold their shape. When an order needs something outside what she already has, that's the first stop: a trip out, sometimes the same day, sometimes a few days later if the colour is unusual.

Once the yarn's in hand, she swatches — a small test square, mostly to check her tension hasn't drifted and the hook size still matches the yarn. It takes ten minutes, and it's the reason two of the same product don't quietly come out different sizes.

Evenings of stitching

The actual stitching happens almost entirely after the day's other work is done. A keychain or a single flower is usually one sitting, an hour or two. An amigurumi toy takes two or three evenings — the body, the limbs, then the fiddly business of sewing every piece together and getting the face right, which she'll sometimes redo if the eyes sit even slightly off-centre. A baby blanket is the biggest job in the shop: roughly two weeks of evenings, the same number of rows worked the same way each night, because a blanket where the tension drifts partway through looks uneven the moment it's laid flat.

Blocking and the final check

When the stitching's done, there's a step most people don't expect: blocking. The finished piece is washed and pinned out to dry in its correct shape, edges pulled straight, stitches evened out. Skip this and a piece curls at the corners and never quite lies flat — it's the extra evening that makes the difference between something that looks handmade and something that looks intentional.

Before anything is packed, Maa goes over the whole piece by hand — every seam, every row — checking for a stitch pulled too tight or a loose end that didn't get woven in properly. If something's off, it gets fixed there, before it's ever seen by anyone else.

Wrapped and packed

Packing is its own small ritual: the piece wrapped, a card written by hand, everything fitted snugly enough that it doesn't shift around in transit. Most orders go from ready to parcel-at-the-door the same day, because once a piece has passed its final check, there's no reason to make it wait.

None of this is unusual for anyone who crochets. What's unusual, maybe, is that it's still done exactly this way for a shop rather than just for family — the same evenings, the same checking, just with your address on the label instead of ours.