I am so excited about these new pencil rolls and artist totes, that I couldn't wait any longer to post a few photos and tell you a little about them. It's a bit of a long story, so I'll just give you the short version... Earlier this year my husband and I travelled to India with our 3 children in order to visit my husband's family and show our children a little of what life is like outside of Australia. We were lucky enough to have 3 months there, so before we left Australia I decided that I would spend some of that time sourcing new fair-trade products and working on some new projects for Dragonfly. My husband was born in India as a Tibetan refugee, so it made sense that we try and start something to support people in the Tibetan-exile community - and so I took with me some samples and some drawings and we hoped we would find a way to make something happen. Everything fell into place beautifully when a friend introduced us to a small workshop of Tibetan women who were more than capable of creating what I wanted. After many visits and cups of tea with them, my designs began to take shape and then it was off to Delhi to choose fabrics (very hot, but very fun!). And so this week, my parcel finally arrived, and when I opened it I found all of those beautiful fabrics transformed into these gorgeous pencil rolls and the fabulous new Artists Tote. I am so happy with the beautiful work the girls have done and how great the colours and designs look, that I just had to take some photos and show everyone immediately.
I haven't added these to the web yet as I still have some calculations to do and I need to take more photos so that you can see all 5 beautiful colours. I hope to have them ready in the next week or so, so keep checking and I will be sure to post again when they are online. Of course, I would only work with this workshop knowing that all the workers are fairly paid and work in excellent conditions - so you can be sure that these have been made in fair and ethical conditions. And more good news is that it looks like we will be doing lots more work with the lovely girls from the Kokonor workshop in the near future.. but that's another long story, so I'll tell you all about that another day.
