The Story of Your Eri Silk Shawl

Meet Iba

Iba Malai grew up in Shillong, Meghalaya, and now runs a women-led Eri silk production unit in the region.

After studying fashion design in Bangalore, she returned to Meghalaya and began building a business around the material, skills and communities she knew from home. What started as a career became something more personal: a way of working with local women, supporting an old craft and creating something that felt useful rather than simply beautiful.

We spoke to Iba for the first episode of Mellow Matters, the all mellow co. podcast, about Eri silk, the women who make it, and the difficulties involved in keeping the tradition alive.

This is the process she described.

 

It Begins with a Leaf

In Meghalaya, Eri silkworms are traditionally reared at home, often in a single room, and fed on castor leaves that grow widely across the region.

In the best conditions, a farmer can rear Eri through three cycles in a year. But the process is closely tied to the seasons. Castor becomes harder to find in winter, and many families choose to grow food crops instead. Eri farming is also slow and demanding, which makes it difficult to maintain when the price of the yarn does not properly reflect the work involved.

This is where the story of our shawls begins: with a plant, a household and a practice that is becoming harder to sustain.

A Cocoon of Peace

Eri silk is often called peace silk because the moth is allowed to emerge from its cocoon before the silk is collected.

The cocoon is not boiled with the moth still inside it, as happens in conventional silk production. The moth completes its life cycle and leaves behind an empty cocoon. Its fibres are then spun into yarn.

That decision gives Eri silk its name, but it also gives the material its character. It is not the glossy, perfectly uniform silk many people imagine. It is softer and more tactile, with a slightly matte surface and a natural irregularity that reminds you it has been made rather than manufactured.

 

Harvested by Hand

After the moth has emerged, the empty cocoons are collected and prepared for spinning.

Eri farming in Meghalaya is usually done by families working from home, rather than on large industrial farms. The work is spread through the community, and the quantities are relatively small.

In the Umden Eri cluster, in the Ri-Bhoi district of Meghalaya, production has declined from what it once was. Castor is not always available, other crops compete for the farmers’ attention, and the process takes time long before a weaver ever touches the fabric.

The future of Eri depends on making that work viable again. Iba and her brother are working to encourage more farmers to rear Eri throughout the year, supplying castor saplings and offering a reliable buyer for the cocoons they produce.

 

Spun into Yarn

Some Eri yarn is spun by hand. Some is spun by machine. Iba works with both, buying directly from Eri farmers and yarn producers rather than treating the material as an anonymous commodity.

Hand-spinning is especially slow. The fibres have to be worked into yarn by people who have learned the process over years, and the margins are often so narrow that the price does not cover the time it takes.

Paying fairly is therefore not an abstract principle. It is part of whether the practice continues at all.

The women who work with Iba are paid for their time, but the production unit also has to fit around the lives they already lead. In Meghalaya, women are central to household income, self-help groups and community life. They are not expected to disappear from that world in order to make a textile.

 

Dyed with Nature

Once the yarn arrives at the production unit, it is dyed using ingredients that are available locally.

Lac gives a deep maroon. Turmeric brings yellow. Other colours come from tree bark, roots, leaves and flowers. The dye bath is prepared by a master dyer, and the yarn is then washed and dried before it is prepared for the loom.

The traditional colours of Eri in Meghalaya include turmeric yellow, charcoal grey, natural white and lac maroon. They are colours with a history in the region, rather than a palette chosen simply because it happens to be fashionable this season.

Natural dyeing also means that no two batches are perfectly identical. The difference is small, but it is there.

 

Woven on Traditional Looms

Before weaving can begin, the dyed yarn has to be wound onto bobbins and arranged into the warp, the vertical threads that give the fabric its structure.

This is one of the most technical parts of the process. If a loom requires 44 threads across its width, the weaver first needs to prepare 44 bobbins. These are gathered together and wound onto a warping drum, section by section, before being transferred to the loom.

Each thread is then drawn through the loom by hand. This creates the spaces through which the weft, the horizontal thread, can pass backwards and forwards, locking the fabric together.

The shawls are woven by women from the local community, using both traditional floor looms and flying-shuttle looms. The floor loom is the older, more traditional loom of Meghalaya. It produces one narrower piece at a time, usually no more than 26 inches wide. A flying-shuttle loom is more modern and can produce wider fabric.

Even with the wider loom, it can take two weavers six or seven days to complete roughly two shawls, including the preparation of the yarn and the warp. A single designed shawl woven on a traditional floor loom may take four or five days.

When people ask why a handmade shawl cannot simply be produced by a particular date, this is the answer. There are many stages before the first line of cloth appears.

 

Tasselled by Hand

Once the fabric has been woven, each shawl is checked and finished by hand.

The edges are completed and the tassels are added individually. It is a small part of the process, but it gives the shawl its final movement and shape.

The work is not rushed to make it look handmade. It is handmade, and that is why it takes the time it takes.

 

Packed with Intention

The packaging has been made especially for us by Lafa Labs in Panjim, Goa, and is adorned with custom illustrations. It is designed to be used as a case for other of your treasured items, such as stationary or beauty products, but it also gives the shawl somewhere meaningful to continue its story as it travels from Meghalaya to you.

 

Why It Matters

In Khasi communities, Eri silk was traditionally considered a grand and valuable fabric. It was used for important gifts, including gifts for kings and tribal leaders, and was often made for wearing, passing down or giving away rather than for ordinary commercial sale.

What makes it matter to us is not only that it is cruelty-free or naturally dyed. It is that the material remains connected to the people and places that have carried it through generations.

Iba speaks about sustainability in three parts: the material, the process and the community. It is not enough to choose a good fibre if the people making it are pushed beyond what their lives can accommodate. It is not enough to pay attention to the final product if the farmers who produce the raw material cannot afford to continue.

A shawl like this takes time because the work is distributed among many people. A farmer grows castor and rears the silkworms. Someone spins the fibres. Someone else prepares the dye. The warp is measured and arranged. The loom is set. A weaver sits with it for days.

There are easier ways to make a shawl. This is simply the way we wanted to make ours.

From castor leaf to cocoon, from yarn to loom, and from Meghalaya to Goa, it carries a chain of decisions about what to use, how to work and how to treat the people involved.

That is what you wear when you put it on.

 

Hear the Story

There is more to Iba’s story than can fit on a product page.

In the first episode of mellow matters, she talks about leaving fashion design in Bangalore to return to Meghalaya, the role of women in Khasi society, the history of Ryndia, and her plans to help revive Eri farming in the Umden area.

She also explains what happens between the castor leaf and the finished shawl, and why making something slowly is not always as simple as choosing to take more time.

Listen to the episode wherever you find your podcasts, or visit allmellow.co to explore the Eri silk collection.