This holiday season was a great one for sarees. My birthday is early in November, so it’s pretty much two months of back-to-back holidays for me, what with Diwali, Halloween, my birthday, Thanksgiving, my wedding anniversary, Christmas and the new year all in that brief period. And what did I do with all that festive spirit? I bought sarees.

I did some quickie bad drapes and had the husband take some photos.

These four all came from a friend-of-a-friend whose sister-in-law is from India. F.O.A.F travels to India periodically, and this time she brought back sarees! All handlooms, for which I have an irresistible attraction, and which are difficult to acquire outside of India.

Saree 1:

This one is a resist-dyed indigo saree. It’s nice, but will probably get used for garb, since it’s not really my sort of thing, as far as everyday wear goes.

(Sorry for the mess and the bad photo; we haven’t done any post-traveling tidying, and keep getting stuff in the mail)

Saree 2

My favorite sort, a thick, soft block-printed cotton number. The body is done in a sort of mango-shaped flower design, and as you can see, the pallu is quite complex. It came with an attached blouse piece that’s cream with the same red borders as the rest of the saree.

Saree 3

A sheer cotton, in burgundy, with black and gold zari borders and a simple black and zari pallu. Does not have a blouse piece, but it goes nicely with the plain choli I was trying these on over.

Saree 4

(Also, sorry for the embarassingly bad drape on this one. It’s a little starchy still.)

Grey, red and black ikat with saffron borders. I’m not sure if this one has a blouse piece or not. There’s an 8-inch bit at each end that’s plainer than the rest of the saree, but I don’t know whether it’s a blouse piece or just a design feature. You can sort of see it on the pallu in the second photo. Anybody have an idea? Ela?

And then there were the ones I showed off all folded, that I bought in Maryland over the Christmas holiday, and then modeled (draped and photographed poorly, as usual). There’s an extra bit of fabric on the end of the pallu for each, which will be a choli eventually.

The blue and gold:

From the top, it’s several colors:

And the pallu is crazy-shiny:

I wrinkled the crap out of it trying to wrangle the extra blouse piece for the photo.

The ikat is dreamy. It’s soft and silky and not as tough to drape as I imagined:

It also has a very complex pallu:

(I’m sure you can imagine that over the blur.)

While I was draping, WH took photos of the cats.

O HAI!

WHAT IS IT THAT YOU ARE DOING?

bleh.

MINE ALL MINE NOT YOURS.

(Cats don’t have emotional volume control, so they talk in all caps.)

Yeah. We lead such exciting lives.

And now my saree count is: 9 synthetic, 1 designer silk, 1 of something questionable, and 13 cotton handlooms (the 1 questionable may be ponchampalli, also, but there wasn’t any identifier on it and the store owner didn’t  remember what it was made out of). At some point in my future I plan on buying a bandhani or two, and also at least one Varanasi silk, but that’s down the road a bit. I need to hold off on sarees for a bit.