On a kani loom there is no shuttle, the way there is on an ordinary loom. There is no thread being thrown back and forth from one side of the cloth to the other. Instead, there are kani — small wooden bobbins, perhaps a hundred and fifty of them, sometimes more, each one wrapped with a different colour of weft.

Each bobbin is responsible for the few millimetres of pattern that pass through its part of the cloth. A weaver moves them, in order, one by one, across the warp — a row of bobbins finishing one line of the design.

A row of weaving is a line of music

The weaver does not improvise. They read from a talim — a code written out in black ink, one symbol per knot, one line per row of the cloth. The talim was either written by them or inherited. A long shawl can require a talim of ten or fifteen thousand lines.

An experienced kani weaver completes about one centimetre of finished cloth in a working day. A shawl of two hundred centimetres takes them somewhere between six months and a year and a half. There are weavers in Kanihama who have been at the same piece since the autumn before last.

One day, one centimetre. So the piece grows.

The slowness is the work

We are sometimes asked why the prices are what they are. The honest answer is that a kani piece is roughly an entire year of one person's working life. Everything else — the pashmina, the dye, the finishing — is small in comparison. When you buy a kani shawl you are buying a year of someone's careful attention.

There is no version of this craft that goes faster. There is a version that uses a power loom and chemical dye and prints the pattern onto the cloth. That is not what we sell.

دھیرے، دھیرے۔ یہی کام ہے۔

We will not hurry these. We will not make more than the artisans can finish. When a piece is ready, it goes into the ledger, and from there into your hands.