Reworking the kantha tradition

Long description

Khushi Kantha (Happy Blanket) Community Interest Company is an award-winning, non-profit social enterprise, inspired by the birth of my half-British, half-Bangladeshi twin daughters and my long-standing dream to use everything I’ve learned from many years of living and working in Bangladesh to support other mothers, whose position I could easily be in myself if circumstances were different.

We are reworking the Bengali ‘kantha’ tradition of upcycling old cotton saris into ultra-soft, multi-layered baby blankets to meet product safety standards while retaining its circular principles.   We partner with sustainably-minded members of the Bangladeshi garments industry to breathe new life into ‘deadstock’ cotton, by using it to line our ‘Happy Blankets’.   We source the hand-woven, hand-dyed cotton we use for the outside layers of our products from a rural weaving cooperative.

Our designs represent a cultural fusion, combining traditional Bengali ‘kantha’ stitching and animal motifs with geometric patterns and a contemporary colour palette. Our four embroidery designs are named after our favourite parts of North-West Bangladesh, where our Happy Blankets are hand-stitched and embroidered with empowerment by a group of mothers in the village of Rajampara, North-West Bangladesh. Our colour palette is named after the mothers and their children.

We created our first collection of Happy Blankets and funded our start-up costs (e.g. products safety testing) through a rewards-based crowdfunding campaign (crowdfunder.co.uk/khushikantha). We’ve now expanded our product range, and started to develop multiple online and offline sales channels, beyond our own online shop (khushikantha.com/shop).

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