Mattu Ki Karigari is a local Himachali brand that started with weaving pine needle baskets and is slowly expanding into handcrafted wood, and bamboo products. This was started by a humble soul MamtaDevi.
Dhanotu, Himachal Pradesh is Mamta’s (मत्तू) home. She has grown up here, playing and running through the hillside Pine forests. The Pine trees fill the air with their fragrance and the Earth with their needle-like leaves, shed year after year.
When Mamta was younger, a few tourists travelled to and stayed in her village. They felt a few things during their stay – that the villagers were hardworking people, that for most of them, a source of additional income would be very helpful and that Pine needles were abundantly available and also a nuisance at times. They recognised that pine needles can be a wonderful material to make a variety of household things with. And so they shared with the village women, a way to bundle, arrange and stitch them together, to make a basic circular and concentric pattern. This could then be replicated and shaped in many many ways, to make many many things :)
The travellers left the village soon after. The village women created a lot of things for their homes. But unsure of how this could be used to bring in money, it started to fizzle out and then completely stopped. By now Mattu had completed her school and college education. Always a curious one, she had seen her mother do wonders with needle and thread. She insisted on learning it and soon enough, her mother conceded to her mountain-like stubbornness. And so it started.
It started with the pine needles refusing to cooperate, with the thread breaking too often and the experiments looking a bit wobbly. But Mattu could not seem to put it aside. It was deeply involving. In time, her creations started to take shape as imagined and secretly hoped for. And with every new design, her curiosity was satiated and then reborn.
A lot of her work, she gifted it to her friends where she was working part-time. Eventually, she began receiving enquiries from people who were willing to pay for the creations. This was when her passion became something to earn from and actively support her family.
Right from collecting the fallen pine needles from the forest to the very last stitch on them and then the couriering, everything is done single-handedly. Roti baskets, coasters, bags for lunch boxes, multipurpose baskets and planters - Mattu has learnt the art of holding empty spaces with needles and thread. And now it can take many many shapes.
