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Two women sit at a wooden table in a workshop, working with fabric and small black pieces. One woman wears a maroon headscarf and uses a ruler and pen on a piece of material, while the other, in a dark headscarf and patterned shirt, leans in to assist. A stack of folded cream-colored fabric sits on the table beside a measuring tape and other supplies. In the background, shelves hold various items, a sewing machine is visible, and a whiteboard hangs on the wall.
  • 2 facilitators

Wednesday 11 November 2026

Scaling fabric preparation, precision cutting, and Kantha embroidery

Facilitated by Shabana K H

What the work needed: people, time, money, space and materials.

What was done with those inputs, step by step.

Production progress

We had a busy and productive day. We continued our production sprint for our store launch. The launch needs an initial inventory of 400 to 500 different Kantha designs. As a team, we completed the full pre-treatment and sizing process. This included washing, drying, and ironing the cotton fabrics. Then we cut them into precise 6 × 6 inch squares. With teamwork, we finished about 350 cut squares in two days. We also photographed the pattern designs for cataloging. We kept steady progress on our Kantha embroidery panels.

Challenges and solutions

Scaling up our cutting volume created technical challenges. Managing bulk fabric was difficult. Keeping dimensional precision was hard. Even after thorough pressing, large stacks of fabric wrinkled again during handling. This required secondary ironing before final assembly. Folding and cutting too many layers at once caused inner layers to shift or bunch up. This led to uneven dimensions. To fix these errors, we used rigid cutting templates. We limited cutting stacks to one to three layers at a time. This ensured uniform 6 × 6 inch squares across the batch. We continued our daily Kantha stitching work.

What the activity directly produced: sessions held, people reached, things made.

What changed for the people who took part, and what showed it.

Achieved 70% to 87% of our initial store launch fabric square target while establishing a standardized, high-accuracy cutting protocol for bulk production. How we know: Verified through physical piece counts, dimensional spot-checks using templates, and direct observation of the revised multi-layer cutting workflow.

(Participants told us)

What the team will keep or change next time.

What worked: Using rigid 6 × 6 inch cutting templates and limiting cutting stacks to a maximum of two or three layers stopped inner-layer shifting. This ensured consistent square dimensions.

What was difficult: Managing large quantities of pressed cotton caused fabrics to re-wrinkle before cutting finished. Cutting thick stacks led to measurement errors.

Changes for next time: Store freshly ironed fabric flat in smaller, manageable batches. Strictly follow the two-to-three-layer cutting limit using templates. This will avoid double-ironing and material waste.

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