Craft Stories

How to Clean and Care for Brass Homeware So It Lasts Generations
A simple guide to cleaning and caring for handmade brass homeware, from everyday polishing to keeping the warm patina you love. Read more...
Indian Wedding Gift Ideas: Handmade Heirlooms the Couple Will Keep
Handmade Indian wedding gift ideas that last, brass, Dhokra and marble heirloom pieces for the couple, curated by House of Taraasha. Read more...
Indian Housewarming Gifts: 12 Handmade Ideas Beyond the Cliche
Twelve handmade Indian housewarming gift ideas, from brass decor to block-print throws, curated for new homes and shipped worldwide. Read more...
Diwali Gift Guide: Meaningful Handmade Indian Gifts for the Home
A Diwali gift guide of handmade Indian pieces, brass diyas, block-print textiles and heritage decor, for gifting to family and friends across the USA, Canada and UAE. Read more...
Raksha Bandhan Gift Guide 2026: Rakhi and Gifts to Send Abroad
The 2026 Raksha Bandhan gift guide for the diaspora: handmade rakhis, lumba sets and gift hampers to send a brother or sister in the USA, Canada or UAE. Read more...
How to Style Indian Heritage in a Modern Home
The mistake people make with Indian decor is thinking it has to be all or nothing. It does not. The most beautiful rooms use heritage pieces the way you would use a single perfect spice: with restraint, for contrast.Start with one object with weight, a hammered brass vessel, a Dhokra figure, and let it sit against something plain. Layer block-print textiles the way you would layer a meal, warm tone on warm tone. Let a Lippan piece be the only thing on a wall. Put a marigold in a brass... Read more...
The Mirror-Workers of Kutch
In the white salt desert of Kutch, in Gujarat, the women of the villages have decorated their round mud homes, the bhungas, for centuries. The craft is called Lippan: a relief of clay and camel dung, studded with tiny mirrors that catch the desert light.It is slow, meditative work. The clay is mixed and pressed by hand into swirling patterns of peacocks, trees and geometry. Each mirror is set individually, angled to throw light differently as the sun moves across the sky. What began as a way to brighten a... Read more...
A Home That Remembers: Bringing India Into Your Space
There is a particular feeling when you walk into a home and something makes you stop. A brass lamp catching the evening light. A block-print throw folded over a chair. It is not loud. It is just true.For those who grew up with it, these objects are memory made solid: the weight of a masala dabba, the smell of a freshly printed razai, the glow of a diya at dusk. For those discovering Indian craft for the first time, they are something rarer still: a genuine story in a room... Read more...
Why Handmade Costs More, and Why It Is Worth It
A machine can make a thousand identical bowls in an hour. A Moradabad artisan makes one, by hand, and it takes a day. That difference is the whole point.When you buy handmade, you are not paying for a product. You are paying for the four hundred years of knowledge in the maker's hands, the hour they spent etching a border no machine could replicate, and the fair wage that keeps a craft alive for one more generation. Mass production optimises for sameness. Handmade celebrates the opposite: the tiny variation, the... Read more...
Printed by Hand: The Block-Printers of Sanganer
In Sanganer, just south of Jaipur, the river once ran in the colours of the dyes. For centuries the block-printers here have carved wooden blocks by hand, one for each colour, and pressed them onto cotton in careful registration, entirely by eye.A single length of block-printed cloth can take days. The carver cuts the motif into seasoned wood. The printer dips, aligns, strikes, lifts, and moves a hand's width along, thousands of times, so that the repeat looks continuous. Where two impressions meet imperfectly, you see the human being who... Read more...
Four Thousand Years of Fire: The Dhokra Method
The Dhokra method is older than most countries. Craftspeople of the Indus Valley were casting metal with the lost-wax technique more than four thousand years ago, and in the forests of Bastar and eastern India the same communities cast it the same way today.The process is unforgiving and beautiful. A core of clay is wrapped in fine threads of beeswax, then coated in more clay. When the mould is fired, the wax melts and runs out, and molten brass takes its place. The mould must then be broken to release... Read more...
The Brass City: Inside Moradabad's Pital Nagari
Two hundred kilometres east of Delhi sits a city that has smelled of hot metal for four centuries. Moradabad is known across India as Pital Nagari, the Brass City, and almost every family here is bound to the trade in one way or another. Someone melts, someone casts, someone hammers, someone etches the fine floral borders by hand.What arrives in your kitchen as a masala dabba began as scrap brass in a furnace, poured, beaten into shape, and finished with a chisel held the same way it was held by... Read more...