Handwork in Germany/India

The second full day in Germany, handwork musings

4.

The next morning, I woke up more or less at the right time. Jetlag gone in a day, not bad, I told myself. Well… then get to work. I had planned to clean the flat and also to call home and find out how things were going with our little store in Guwahati…

For those who haven’t already heard we have opened a little store called ‘Creative Hands’ selling only hand-made and home-made items. The genesis of the shop is as follows: as many of you know I have always been a fan of hand-made and self-made things but have never really been creative with my hands myself. I love going to craft fairs, melas and exhibitions where artists, artisans and weavers come to sell their creations. In Germany, just before Christmas there are amazing markets where lots of beautiful handmade decorative articles are sold. Also in the periodic markets that happen in cities and towns, one gets to buy lovely pottery, cane, straw and bamboo items, glass ware and also different kinds of jewellery and clothing.

In India most of these melas are mostly around festivals like Bihu and Diwali, and it is often the case that when you are looking for a nice gift to give someone, there is no mela on just then from where you could buy a nice gift. So I have often dreamt of opening a shop which would be a sort of permanent mela and house many shops within a shop… But this dream I have carried around in my heart, not knowing if ever I would be able to do something about making it happen. Renting a shop seemed too risky. I told myself that I would give it a try if and when one of the shops in front of my parents’ home became free.

That happened last December and I told myself that if I ever wanted to have that artisan shop then now as my chance. I don’t want to go into the details of how things fell in place but they did and we formally inaugurated our shop called ‘Creative Hands’ on the 6^th Feb. 2024, just a little over two months ago. We have been lucky and have found many ‘creative partners’ who are our suppliers and have wanted to be part of this experiment and we now have a pretty little shop running in Guwahati. We are doing reasonably well given that we are still very new. I have enough reason to be happy, dream fulfilled.

I wish I could just be happy, but having seen a few people in Germany work with their hands, I know what really good hand-made things can and should be like. My sister in law, Inez, was an artist. Besides doing the usual paintings and working also on glass, she also used to buy plain white pottery, then paint on them and then get them fired in a proper kiln, before doing the glazing etc. She once made a complete dinner service for Christmas with gold paint. It was really lovely. 

Four of Inez's plates

She also made cards, mostly by getting reduced prints of her paintings or getting prints of photos she had taken and then sticking them onto plain cards. She also made lovely cloth dolls for all the grandchildren. She could also fold or cut paper to make beautiful little objects like flowers or little gift boxes, and she could also do amazing things with cloth, with felt, with wire and with gauze. I was always amazed at her nimbleness with her fingers and her creativity. She hated doing the same thing twice. Most of her gifts to us were often hand-made and I used to love her for that.

But she hardly ever sold anything, she didn’t even try. Her standard reason was that there were hundreds of people in Germany who were as creative, if not more; one had to be much better, she told me, to be able to sell.  I guess I was her sole customer as I insisted on buying all my Christmas cards from her. Every Christmas, she came up with a new motif related to Christmas, painted it, got the copies printed and got about five dozen cards made of the same design which she then sent out to all her friends. I got whatever was left over.

Anita Leutwiler is another very dear German friend and artiste who is more successful. She has made a name in the field of Textile Art as one of the top patchwork artists in Germany. And her creations are absolutely marvelous – for not only does she stitch together patches to create a beautiful quilt, she then does embroidery on the quilts, or does fabric paint on them to create absolute works of art. She gives workshops and demonstrations, and has been invited to present her work at many prestigious exhibitions. 

She also gets postcards printed using her patchwork motifs and has even a few children’s books to her credit where the illustrations are taken from her patchwork quilts. When I told her about ‘Creative Hands’ she immediately said, That’s a very nice thing you have started there to encourage people to create beautiful things.' When I told her about my dream one night that she was doing a workshop in Guwahati and training in creating patchwork quilts to some of our ladies, she said, 'At 83 years of age, I don't think that's possible any more. But what I can do is I could give you some copies of my children’s book about India and some postcards to keep in your little store… of course I do not need the money, use it as you deem best.’ And she kept her word. Anita has a heart of gold!

Over the years, she has found some appreciative buyers for her work. But even she does not sell a lot, because her patchwork quilts are not cheap. They cannot be, given the time and effort and the minute attention to detail that goes into its making. Not sure if she would have been able to make a living out of her work, but she does sell, at least enough to be able to sustain the expenses of pursuing her chosen craft.  But how much she sells  is not what is of paramount importance for her. Her husband is a professor of mathematics at the university and has always supported and encouraged Anita to pursue her interest and talent in textile art.

What is most important for Anita is not to compromise on quality. Each piece she creates is an absolute work of art, and she keeps working on them, sometimes for months on end, before she is happy and ready to share it with the world. If they don’t get sold, too bad. She lives her craft and you can see how artistic she is in the way she dresses, the way she talks, in her motifs and in the themes she chooses. For instance, when she travelled to India once with friends, she was so fascinated by the colours and textures of India that she decided to take back small pieces of silk and whatever else she could find for little money and has since created a huge quilt titled ‘The land where the ginger grows’ in which she sewed in her idea of India with much love and care. [We were lucky to be able to buy that beautiful patchwork quilt from her to hang in the staircase of our Volkach home.] And the many smaller patchwork quilts that she made on India was brought together into a fantastic children’s story titled ‘Excuse me, is this India?’

The point that I am trying to make is, can we measure the things we are selling at Creative Hands with the quality and perfection of the creations of the two German ladies mentioned above? Forget about Anita’s perfect patchwork quilts, if Inez’s creations are not good enough to be sold then most of what we are selling in Creative Hands is also not good enough. Most of our Creative Partners are amateurs, at best they have looked up a couple of You Tube tutorials about how to paint on wooden coasters, do macramé work or make resin jewellery and then they have started doing it as a hobby, as a pastime. You can see that they are not doing anything original, they are simply replicating nice things that they have seen others do in their own style. Sometimes even that can be enough – like the amazing three dimensional wall hangings using stones we have seen Krishna produce. But not always.

In that sense, apart from Stuti who is producing some very striking paintings and has developed her own style, there were not many others who were really original besides, perhaps, the two men who work with wood – one of them does solar pyrography and writes on wood and the other one creates nice objects with driftwood or uprooted tree trunks. The others are creating nice objects by hand, no doubt, but not trying very hard to develop their own style. And they are not doing everything from scratch -- they are buying the basic product, then embellishing it in their own style and then selling it as their own. They are trying to create things that they can produce fast so that they can keep the prices reasonable, which then gives them a better chance of getting sold. But is getting sold the only aim we have, do we not also want to become masters at the craft we are practicing, take it to a level where we can teach others how to do things, starting with the basic raw materials? Only Aradhana with her intricate Quillcraft, and Musfika with her splendid ribbon embroidery, have reached that level of expertise, I imagine.

Nor are they trying to do basic and standard things like cutting wood to make even simple objects like trays and coasters; even the very basic small three legged stand (to prop their plates etc.) they simply order over Amazon! And today, one of my Creative Partners told me she was ordering the four (not legs but rather) short wooden supports for a steel trunk that I have given her to paint and upcycle. I could have cried.

Petra, another German friend of mine who is not an artist, but is very good with her hands nonetheless, was aghast when she heard this. You can buy a small lathe machine and a table-saw and set up a carpentry workshop at Sishugram where your girls can produce all the stuff your Creative Partners are buying from Amazon, she told me confidently. I could teach them the basics in a week!

She was right. Most Germans knew how to do these things. They had learnt probably at school or later by just helping their parents to make things at home. We had a little table saw in the workshop in our home in Volkach and everyone at home (except me) knew how to work it, and had used it sometime or another – Stephan to build me a bird house and a temple for me, Hans to put in an extra shelf into my cupboard and to elongate his bed so that he did not necessarily need to fold his legs to fit, and Inez to create wooden puzzles for the grandchildren to play with. Why did I never ever try my hand at those machines, I still do not know, except that I have an innate aversion for technology, and am terrified of learning something new.

Petra certainly knew how to do all these things, and probably more, given how practical and hands on she was. Petra told me that as a little child, she loved working in their ‘Werkstatt’ with her father. You can be happy if our darling kids in India know what a screwdriver is. ‘Teaching your girls in Sishugram how to do carpentry will also help to break the stereotype that only boys can do such things, girls should be rather doing embroidery and knitting.’ I couldn’t agree more. And then perhaps even I could learn something there. It was Petra who took me to the local DIY shop and showed me stuff that I could buy and take home to stop the draught of dust and traffic smoke through the gap in the door of our store. And she gave me twenty different ideas of what one else one could do to solve the problem.

Not content with having a ‘Werkstatt’ only in Volkach, Stephan needed a full set of tools at hand also in India. I still remember the time Stephan and I went to buy some tools in Guwahati and the shopkeeper asked us if we were setting up a factory! One shouldn’t be surprise because in India, we don’t even know how to assemble a piece of furniture. After we have bought it, we need someone to come home and set it up for us. When the fact is, that everything is there including a step by step guide to what needs to be done. But do we ever try? Not many do. No wonder we have to order trays from Amazon to paint on.

In Germany you do not have a choice, except when you are called Meenaxi and are lucky enough to have friends who are ready to help you. I still remember the time when I was doing up my flat here and we had bought a number of cupboards and shelves from IKEA. But then they needed to be assembled. It was Stephan’s daughter Benedikta, together with another helper who I had to pay by the hour, who together put everything up, while I just sat around and didn’t try to help. So I am as bad an Indian as it can get!

And in the last two years it has been Jürgen who has done all the DIY work that needed to be done in the flat. I cannot tell you how useful it has been to have him staying in my flat from time to time. In fact, he always did much more than what I asked him to do. ‘Since I had all the tools and had that extra shelf, I put it in’ he told me. Another time he filled a narrow gap in the shelving in the kitchen ‘so that nothing would ever fall down that hole and get you swearing again’. Jürgen was not only able to do things with his hands, he also enjoyed it and had many ideas about how one could do it differently or do it better.  Because he wanted to get it right in the end, he would put in some serious thought into how he would do things before he started. That is why he did not like me hovering around him, impatiently waiting for him to get started. ‘You tell me what you want and then you please leave. I will let you know when it is done,’ was his standard instruction to me.

And some of the things that Jürgen has done in his home is much more than plain DIY, it borders on the artistic. By profession he is an ethno-musicologist, but he has a great interest in musical instruments of which he has a large collection. Not just that, he has produced a few guitars, each unique in its own way.  He has also set up his own acoustic sound studio in a basement room in his house all by himself. And he has been very creative and cost-effective about his choice of materials. He uses a bamboo wall to dampen the sound when required. Else there is a wall with thick curtains which hides as a plain wall which can also be used when necessary. And when I told him about my wish to create a hall with reasonable sound quality in Guwahati, he gave me some very cost effective options immediately – ‘Use egg plates on dampen the sound that hits the ceiling, do not put in a false ceiling, use thick curtains on the walls as a sound dampener and see how it goes. Don’t invest too much right away, go slow. Keep experimenting. New ideas will keep coming as the days go by.’ And just so that he would have enough cane to pursue his latest interest in wicker making, Jürgen had planted a whole hedge with cane cuttings… It will give me something new that I can teach myself in winter besides knitting socks, he tells me, because then I won’t have to be chopping wood or plucking fruit and then making jams and conserves.

And Jürgen and Petra are just normal Germans, they did not learn any of these things specially somewhere, they are professionally doing completely different things. But being able to put up an extra shelf or change the leaking tap in the kitchen or even hang a painting is something that almost every German will be able to do. In contrast, when I suggested to the organizing team at Creative Hands that we could keep some readymade frames in our shop and just frame the paintings if the customer wanted it framed, not many were convinced that it was a very feasible proposition!

So what is the long and short of this very long discussion – that we have to learn to do a few more things with our hands starting from scratch…that we should not always settle for quick and cheap solutions, we should be ready to put in whatever it takes in order to create something beautiful that we can be proud of. We need to push ourselves to give our best. And I need to learn how to assemble furniture and get a carpentry workshop going in Sishugram so that along with the other easy things, even picture frames can be made there. And while we are at it, what about also planting a hedge of cane so that the girls could also learn some wicker work… as you can see, even I can only borrow ideas from others, I don’t have very many original ones of my own. But that is probably why I never claimed to be a creative partner at ‘creative hands’, I am just a part of the organizing team!

But I do feel that all of us have to make a big effort to raise the quality of the products we are selling at Creative Hands. I have no excuse, for even if the others don’t, I know from observing my German friends that we can do much better…

 That was a long story, wasn’t it, when actually I was all the time meaning to hoover my flat and then do the floors with a mop. I guess it is something about being Indian that makes us procrastinate and postpone having to use our limbs to do something useful around the house. And one could even survive in India without moving an arm, thanks to the maids and part-time helpers and live-in-staff that you can afford to pay for. But that is not the case in Germany. Therefore, I would just need to get on with the Hoover… but it is not working too well, perhaps the dust sack is full! But I have forgotten how to open the Hoover to change it, HELP!