These incredibly soft beautiful woven silk scarves are made by a small scale workers co-operative in India. We very carefully hand wash and dye them at our small outside dye house in Oxfordshire, using well water and plant or insect dyes, many of which are grown or gathered by us in a sustainable way from the organic Estate on which we are based. When we do use imported dyes we source these directly, or from a company with a strong ethical sourcing policy.
The joy of natural dyes is the wide variety of colours, shades and tones we are able to produce. Whilst it would, in many ways be easier and more practical to batch dye and standardise our colours, we are reluctant to give up the individual and experimental and we enjoy making the results of this available to our customers. Therefore we give each colour or shade we produce a unique name and photograph it with a label, so that you can be clear about what you are buying. We name some of the classic colours that each dyestuff produces after the dyestuff itself (e.g. woad blue or madder red), other colours are named using the Pantone colour system (this occasionally causes confusion as several Pantone colours are also plant names - please contact us if you would like to know what dyestuffs have been used to create a particular colour).
These scarves are so incredibly fine that we find them tricky to handle and dye, therefore we have decided not to stock any more of them for the time being, so these are the last few remaining. However we will continue to stock Organza and Wild Silk scarves and Silk scarves with cotton dots, made by the same company (see separate listings).
We have a policy of buying no new packaging material for use in posting out parcels, we re-use old packaging gathered from other local businesses, individuals and schools. We hope you will enjoy receiving your parcel, whatever shape and size it is, knowing that it has a little less impact on the environment.