This week we completed our fourth out of the four mini-consulting projects which constitute the main body of the CraftHER programme. From Monday to Friday we had the pleasure of spending a week at Swara Voice of Women, the social enterprise from which the CraftHER fellowship stems.
Our main task for the week was to devise a brand new clothing collection for Swara, complete with: samples of each piece; a cohesive theme or story which underpinned the collection; and promotional materials through which the clothing could be marketed on Swara’s website and socials.
As with all of the mini-consulting projects that we had completed thus far, us six scholars were required to work collaboratively on the collection. Our brief stipulated that the collection must be capped at a total of ten pieces, due to time constraints. This meant that we had to come to an agreement on who would design only one item and who would design multiple. Being not much of a designer myself and instead hoping to play a key role in the marketing of the products, I volunteered to create only one piece. But rather, I should say that I volunteered to co-create one piece.
This brings me onto the other key element of collaboration that each of us scholars had to focalise during our time designing the collection at Swara. The mini-consulting brief set by Asha, the founder and CEO emphasised that, just as with all products made by Swara, the designing of a piece only constitutes a partial contribution to the process of its creation. The work of Swara’s tailors, their advice and input into the theoretical design as well as the labour that they put into converting sketches into real products, means that all the clothing would not merely be work attributed to us scholars alone but would be a physical manifestation of the creative collaboration between ourselves and the tailors.
This fact is something that we chose to accentuate in the naming of the collection; myself and a fellow CraftHER scholar, Alba, came up with the name WovenTogetHER. The intention behind this was to reference the fact that each clothing piece was co-created by two groups of women: the scholars and the tailors at Swara.
Yet, the title also alluded to the concept that, through the six week CraftHER programme, the lives of us scholars from the other side of the globe have become intertwined with those of brave, enterprising and compassionate women in four separate organisations across Kerala. To pay homage to the incredible women we have met during CraftHER, I had the idea of having each piece in the collection bear the name of a woman that we were inspired by over the six weeks.
Thus, the collection was not only a manifestation of the collaboration that occurred between us and the Swara tailors, but also of our immense gratitude to each and every woman that we have been lucky enough to meet, learn from, connect with, and work alongside during the last six weeks.
If anyone is keen to take a look at the collection and support Swara’s amazing social impact work, head over to and follow both the CraftHER and Swara Instagram accounts!
Now it's onwards to the final week of CraftHER, which will be all about working on Personal Projects and saying our final goodbyes :(