There is a difference between giving something up and putting it down.

Ishana's mother put hers down. She designed, and she hand-embroidered — at the kitchen table, after the house went quiet, in hours nobody was asking her for. She was good enough that people asked her where she'd bought things, and she talked, occasionally and never for very long, about doing something with it one day. She never did.

When Ishana told Isha this, Isha said: mine too. Isha's mother knitted — woollens. Not the same craft, and not the same intensity, but the same shape: something she was good at, done in the gaps, and never turned into anything more.

We told each other these stories expecting them to be unusual. They weren't. Every woman we asked had one, about a mother, an aunt, or herself. It isn't a coincidence, it's a generation: their own work went politely to the back of the queue and stayed there, and most of them never said a word about it.

What we can't get past is that neither of them threw anything away. The sketches stayed. The threads stayed, wound and labelled. The wool stayed. They stayed ready for an opening that took thirty years to arrive.

So we started this late — later than anyone would call sensible, with jobs and responsibilities that don't pause while you find yourself. It was mostly frightening and frequently boring: the registrations, the fabric that arrived in the wrong weight, the 3 months when almost nobody ordered anything. Nobody puts that part in the story. We're putting it in ours.

Everything we make is hand-embroidered — not machine-run and finished by hand, but worked by one person from the first stitch. A machine lays the same pattern down in forty minutes; ours take 20 to 100 hours, most of it on detail you'll only find if you're close enough to touch it. It's an inefficient way to run a business, and it's also the only honest way we know to make something slowly, by hand, mostly unwitnessed, and finish it anyway.

Which is roughly how you got here.

Our mothers are both in their late sixties. Neither of them got her turn at thirty.

Now, Nothing goes into production now until our mothers have seen it.

They kept the sketches. They kept the threads and the wool. They stayed ready.

So did you.

-Isha & Ishana