Kamal Kadai experiments

Atlast!! Picked up needle'n thread after a long long time... :) and yeah,it felt good...mmmmm

For a while, I have been thinking of trying Kamal Kadai on shapes other than the traditional ones. Kamal Kadai or Navar work is a needle weaving technique and is quite popular in India.You can find a couple of tutorials on basic Kamal Kadai and beaded Kamal Kadai in the sidebar of this blog.

Most of the floral designs in this method follow the basic step petal pattern shown below and that's what I was looking to change.

Needle weaving involves weaving on straight lines.These lines cannot follow curves.Now how do I fill a curved area?

After a bit of trial and error, I ended up doing this...

I outlined the shape with back stitch and then filled the inside with the foundation lines. From the back stitched outline, I weaved over and under in the usual manner. In this case, the outline too was considered as a foundation line and I always passed the needle over and under the backstitch or vice versa. It looked good!!


This the first of my many trials. Although happy with the filling part, every time I looked at the overall pattern, I felt it lacked something.

After looking at it,walking across it umpteen times,pondering over it,I decided to redo this pattern with a few changes... But about that,not now... in the next post...

Till then,
Love,luck and sunshine,
Deepa