What is pashmina?

Pashmina cashmere, also known as the "diamond fiber" and the "soft gold of high Asia", is the most precious of natural fibres. Pashmina is the thin, inner coat of hair of the Himalayan mountain goat Capra Hircus that thrives at over 12,000 feet above sea level in the Himalayas. This undergrowth insulates the mountain goat during the long, harsh winters. Each pashmina hair is about 12-14 microns, approximately one sixth of the diameter of human hair. Each goat produces only 80-100 grams of this ultra fine hair each year and the annual growth of three goats is needed to make a single pashmina shawl. The goat is not harmed in the process of producing pashmina as the hair is collected after being shed naturally. This is unlike the process of producing shahtoosh, in which the endangered Tibetan antelope Chiru is killed.

Pashmina is a luxury item. When it first became popular in the international market a few years ago, the prices were outrageously high. Since then, the market has become more competitive and you can easily find reasonable prices. Unfortunately, the drop in prices has been accompanied by a widespread drop in quality and the proliferation of fake pashminas. To be sure about the quality of your pashmina purchase, the reliability of your supplier is critical.

At Phelge Nepal we use top quality pashmina cashmere not below 88% purity (varies from 88-95% purity) blended with finest wool. This is much softer, lightweight and fragile. Lower quality pashmina is a mix of wool from other areas of the animal, including the shoulders, where the wool is much coarser. The top quality throat wool is exceedingly soft, and also harder to work with because it is more fragile than non-pashmina cashmere.

Cashmere Handweaving Process

Pashmina making in Nepal is an art, a craft that involves hand processing skills passed down through generations. Our adept Nepalese artisans, mostly women, separate the thinnest, silkiest hairs and weave them into various articles that are luxuriously soft, warm, lightweight, and durable. A few years ago pashminas were mainly woven plain but there are now a variety of other weaves to choose from, such as twill, herringbone, basket weave, stripes, random weave. Pashmina comes naturally in off white, gray or brown but the wool is easily dyed to complement any color scheme. We can dye any color from the Pantone Matching System Color Guide. Dyeing is done manually using colorfast eco-friendly dyes. Thus, the color shade of one pashmina from one batch might look slightly lighter or darker than another batch. Design add-ons, such as jacquard patterns (honeycomb, paisley flowers, diamond, fish scale, leaves, peacocks, and others), stripes, and plaids are also available.

The following steps are undertaken to make a pashmina shawl or blanket:

1. Setting up the loom
The loom needs to be specially mounted for each different size of craft. For shawls, setting up the loom takes 2-3 days and for blankets 3-4days. Setting up a Jacquard loom takes 7-10 days.

2. Preparing yarn skeins
The skeins are rolls of yarn loaded into the shuttle that travels back and forth to lay down the horizontal "weft" of the weave across the long vertical "warp" threads.


3. Hand weaving
The weaver starts with her/his feet controlling the shuttle movement as the hands guide the bar that tamps down the weft thread as it is laid down. He has to maintain a consistent rhythm with hand and feet in order to produce a regular weave. This rhythm is the defining skill of a good weaver. Each weaver can optimally weave 6-8 shawls or 2-4 blankets in a 7-hour shift day. After one size production is completed, all parts of the loom have to be thoroughly cleaned to make sure that there are no loose threads, tiny straws or any other foreign object that could block the moving parts of the shuttle or get incorporated into the fabric.

4. Massaging
Each woven piece is then hand massaged thoroughly to relax the fibres that have undergone stress during the weaving process. After the massage is finished, the wrap is ready to take to the dyer.

5. Hand-dyeing
Dyers with immense patience and generations of experience are the ones who dye our pashmina pieces, as even the smallest negligence reflects on the quality of the product. The first step of the dyeing process is to wash the pieces in neutral liquid detergent. Each piece must be clean when it goes into the dyeing cauldron to avoid dark spotting. Our dyers have hundreds of colour shades to choose from but can also match samples provided by clients or according to the Pantone Colour Chart Code. Despite all the care exercised in measuring dye proportions, calibrating water temperature, and timing immersion, dyeing is an inexact art: if you order two shawls of the same color but place the orders a week apart, you will notice a slight difference in the colour shade. Once the colour powder mix is ready, the dye is dissolved in warm water in a large cauldron and about 6 shawls at a time are soaked and stirred for about an hour; dark shades require more soaking at higher temperatures than lighter ones. Then the pieces are soaked in fresh water with neutral detergent and colour fixer for fifteen minutes then in a weak softener solution for another fifteen minutes. After soaking, the pieces are then drained and rinsed in freshwater.

6. Sun drying
The pieces are then dried naturally in the open air; this is gentler on the fabric than machine drying. The drying time depends on weather conditions, and introduces one of the more significant variables in delivery time. The shawls need to be completely dry before they can go to the next stage of the process.

7. Tassling or Fringing
After the drying, the fringes have to be twisted and knotted. This process can't be done at an earlier stage, or the fringes would not be completely dyed. The making of the distinctive fringes and design is perhaps one of the most interesting stages of shawl making. It takes hours to fringe each pashmina shawl or blanket.

8. Final Quality Check, Pressing, Labeling and Packing


After fringing, each piece (except those that have to undergo embellishments such as printing, beading or embroidery) is given a final inspection as to the quality of weaving, evenness of design and color, softness, fringes, and overall tidiness. Then it goes for labeling, ironing, folding, and packing.




Phelge Nepal hand-painted crafts in pure silk and in lightweight cashmere-silk blends are the epitome of luxury, style and fashion. We keep abreast of colour and design trends each year to offer our discerning customers the best at very reasonable prices. We have a collection of a thousand different designs, from florals to animal designs to nature abstracts and others, but we do also welcome buyers' designs, whether in rough sketch or final graphics format. Our talented graphic designers are quite adept at putting ideas into a form that can be hand painted by our artists. And we assure you that your designs will be treated as your exclusive property.

We have had about fifteen years experience in hand-painting, using the resin or gutta outline technique and the freehand technique. Our hand-painted crafts are pre-shrunk and colourfast. For silk, we use high quality crepe de chine, georgette and satin imported from China. For cashmere we hand-paint locally handloom-woven lightweight 70% pashmina cashmere-30% silk blend, popularly known as water pashmina. Phelge Nepal offers hand-painted fabrics, shawls, stoles, scarves, neckties, designer evening dresses and gowns, bath robes, pyjamas, ladies' tops, wall hangings, sarees, and home linens.

The hand-painting process starts with stretching the natural off white fabric onto the painting frame. Our artists carefully apply the colours using various brushes and techniques according to previously designed patterns, starting from the lightest to the darkest shades. Very often we put colours on the top of each other to achieve special effects. Since each piece is individually painted the designs are continually changing and no two creations are exactly alike. The hand painting techniques require delicate touch and each competed piece is a work of art. You might notice slight inconsistencies from one piece of the same design to another but our artists do their utmost to render such imperfections in a way that blend in with the basic design. There might also be slight colour variations in each piece as the climatic condition create such natural effects on the cloth materials. Please allow a discrepancy of 1 - 4cm in the sizes of finished pieces.

Work on each hand-painted craft is closely supervised by our experts. The interpretation of every design is solely based on our artists' imagination. All products are closely inspected for any variation that we find unacceptable before finally being approved for dispatch.


What is dhaka?

The word dhaka refers to the cotton handloom woven cloth traditionally used in Nepal to make the Nepali cap for men, locally known as topi, and shawls and other garments to warm people during chilly weather in the hills and mountains. One story holds that the colourful topi , which has largely replaced the plain black topi, was introduced by a minister who returned with the idea from Dhaka, Bangladesh. Others believe that the name was given to the cloth simply because many items, such as cloth and thread, came to Nepal from or through Dhaka, Bangladesh or because Dhaka muslin resembled the fine Nepalese weaving of the cotton cloth. However, the pattern weaving technique practiced around Dhaka called Jamdani differs considerably from that used by Nepalese weavers. It is also possible that Hindu weavers, fleeing from Dhaka at the time of the Muslim invasions, settled in or near Nepal and influenced Nepalese weavers to some extent.

Process Description

Phelge Nepal cotton dhaka table accessories are woven in wooden hand looms. The first step is preparing the warp, the lengthwise yarn attached to the lower and higher ends of the loom, from skeins of mercerized cotton threads produced in southern Nepal. The weaver sits in front of the cloth beam to which one end of the warp is attached. As the cloth is woven and wound on to the cloth beam, the weaver loosens the tension cord and allows as much of the warp to move towards her as she requires before transferring to the heddles, so there is hardly any wastage.

The best-known method of Dhaka-cloth weaving is called the weft-inlay pattern using a plain ground weave with a supplementary weft (horizontal threads) of a different colour laid alongside the ground weft in selected areas to create a pattern. For the white ground weft, weavers use one strand of 2 or 3-ply mercerized cotton thread. For the supplementary weft they use thicker ply mercerized cotton.

Another technique of dhaka weaving is called tapestry weave. The coloured weft threads in this case are not supplementary but are woven back and forth in their own pattern areas to form the actual structure of the textile. The warp is less visible in this type of dhaka, although not as hidden as in the standard tapestry which is entirely weft-faced. One method of joining colour areas is that of dovetailing where two wefts go round a common warp end making the colours meet. Some weavers also use inter-penetrated dovetailing, where the wefts from adjacent areas alternately pass into the other area and then turn on an adjacent warp-end, rather than a common one, to create jagged outlines. Other weavers use double-interlocked tapestry methods where the different colour weft areas are joined by interlocking them in each shed: a ridge of interlocking loops will show at the colour joints on the working face, i.e. the side facing the weaver, but is smooth on the other side.

Patterns and Motifs

A typical Nepalese weaver knows on average about 100 basic patterns and is constantly creating new ones. From bold geometric shapes to complex floral patterns, some basic motifs - like the zig zag pattern - occur in endless varieties. Many patterns on the miniature (leaf 127 of the Nepalese palm manuscript "Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita", dated A.D. 1015) can be rediscovered in contemporary weaving patterns.

There is a wide variety of dhaka patterns, from bold geometric shapes and temple outlines to complex floral patterns. Only some motifs are given specific names, such as the temple (mandir) and elephant trunk (hatti sunr). Others are interpreted by the individual weavers as diamonds, zigzags, butterflies or flowers, or are just referred to as butta. No two strips are identical, and within one length of warp the weaver usually changes the pattern every certain length. This not only makes it more interesting for the weaver but also means that s/he can offer a passing customer or shopkeeper a choice of patterns. S/he will cut off the sections required, leaving at least 15 cm of woven cloth: this is dampened to ensure a good grip and then rolled around the cloth beam for the weaving to continue. Although some basic shapes are similar, colour and composition are decided upon by the individual weaver, making each piece of weaving a unique creation.

One of the best-known strip patterns is based on stepped diamond shapes along the centre. These are framed by broad, stepped lines and half-diamond shapes emerging from the selvage. According to weavers, this pattern is easy to weave and is often one of the first patterns for a beginner to practice on. An experienced weaver can weave one or two pcs runner size with this type of pattern. A more complex pattern might take several days. The diamond appears in many other patterns in different sizes, colours, and outlines (smooth, jagged, stepped) and either joined up closely or kept separate - so that each woven strip has a different appearance. Often patterns or colours are arranged diagonally, allowing the supplementary weft to continue upwards from pattern to pattern.

Diamonds or hexagonal shapes with a variety of centre patterns are woven into all over designs or linked up to form new patterns, often in such a way that the background becomes the dominant pattern. Positive and negative forms are freely interchanged from one weaving to the other. There are many different types of zigzag patterns and an even wider range based on the outline of a Nepalese temple. Often this is arranged in stripes and alternated with the elephant trunk or hatti sunr pattern, interspersed with cross designs. Another truly Nepalese design is that based on the national flower, Rhododendron arboreum, or lali guras (Nepal's national flower) . Flowers have been the inspiration for many weavers and are incorporated in various shapes into a multitude of patterns.



What is lokta?

Nepal lokta paper is handmade from the fibres of lokta and other natural fibres. Lokta is the fibrous inner bark of the high altitude forest shrub called lokta (Daphne bholua and D. papyracea). It grows abundantly in the wild on the southern slopes of Nepal's Himalayan forests between 1600 - 4000 metres (5,250-13,000 feet). Lokta is one of the strongest paper fibres, and since new growth regenerates quickly it provides a renewable resource for the artisans who depend on the fragile ecosystem of Nepal for their livelihoods. Durability and resistance to insects and mildew are the outstanding features that have helped lokta paper gain popularity worldwide.

Historically, lokta paper was a single purpose product used primarily for government records and religious texts. Since the 12th century AD, traditional handmade paper has been produced in several locations in the rural hills of western Nepal, most notably the central district of Baglung. As early as the 1930s, however, handmade paper production declined due to paper craft imports from Tibet. By the 1960s, the traditional Nepalese paper industry was virtually moribund due to competition by mass produced paper made by machine in India. In the 1970s, before rejuvenation of the industry began, only a few families in Baglung and neighbouring Parbat District retained the traditional knowledge of handmade lokta paper production. Today the handmade paper industry is growing at a rate of 15% per year, and harvesting and rural paper making takes place in at least 16 hill districts. About 70% of all handmade paper products use lokta fibre and 30% use cotton waste and other recycled natural fibres.

Lokta handmade paper production is a forest-based industry. It relies as much on a ready supply of Daphne shrub bark as it does on the skills of traditional paper makers and block printers, and on markets for end products.

Lokta Paper Making Process



Below are the steps involved in making our lokta paper crafts:

1. peeling off the lokta barks
2. washing the peeled lokta fibres
3. boiling the lokta fibres to soften them
4. cutting and grinding of lokta fibres
5. pouring water on the ground lokta
6. boiling the lokta until the mixture turns into a pulp of even consistency
7. pouring the cooked lokta pulp into a wooden frame which filters out the water
8. the pulp is evenly spread on the frame then dried in the sun
9. dried lokta paper sheets are carefully removed from the frame
10. lokta paper sheets are stacked
11. lokta paper is made into various crafts, such as stationery sheets, notebooks, penholders, gift wrappers, gift bags, gift boxes, gift baskets, vanity boxes, knick
12. knacks boxes, storage boxes, storage drawers, photo frames, photo albums, scrapbooks, wallpaper, hanging or tabletop lanterns, lampshades, art materials, wall decors