The marigold heads had been sitting in the pot for 20 minutes, bleeding gold into the water, when Amal S Pillai realised his mother was watching him from the window. He had placed three bricks in the courtyard, balanced a pot between them, and fed a fire underneath it with whatever wood he could find. This was the only laboratory available to him. Inside the pot, instead of the marigolds, sometimes there were onion skins, or rose petals, and a piece of cloth folded around. He was trying to make the plant print itself onto the fabric through heat and pressure, a process called bundle dyeing, and he had been failing at it for two years. “I tried multiple times, and it was a failure. I kept reading articles and communicating with people, but nobody would tell me the trade secrets,” he says.
Amal slowly learned that synthetic fabric takes no dye, so he switched to cotton and silk. He discovered that the cloth needed preparation before the flowers touched it. He experimented with what grew near him — guava leaves, rose petals, tea, turmeric, pathimugam bark. After over six months of daily experiments — usually outdoors, often in the early morning before his IT job began — the prints started adorning the fabric.
Over the last year, Amal has conducted over 40 workshops across Chennai and Kochi, run natural dyeing sessions for around 200 participants, and collaborated with companies including Starbucks as part of corporate employee engagement programmes. His follower count on Instagram climbed to 12,000, after a reel on bundledying went viral.
A Keralite based in Chennai, Amal works full-time in information technology and runs his sustainable craft brand, Amsham, on weekends. The name means “particles” in Malayalam, a reference to his practice of fusing waste material into new objects. Amsham began almost 10 years ago when he was an intern recovering from a fracture with time on his hands and not enough money to buy proper craft supplies.
Inside a workshop
Amal’s bundle dyeing workshops — one of 32 different ones he offers — run for three hours and begin with an open question-and-answer session. “The colour will shift depending on the quality of water and flowers. It is not guaranteed you’ll get the result you want,” he tells participants.
Each participant receives a piece of cotton fabric and a selection of four materials: peepal leaves, onion skin, marigold flowers, and rose petals. These four, Amal says, will produce colour in almost any condition. Participants arrange the flowers on the cloth, fold and bundle it, and drop it into a pot of boiling water for 20 to 30 minutes. In the end, each person opens their own bundle while the group watches.
On being visible
Amal speaks plainly about the hostility that comes with being visible on Instagram, as someone who doesn’t have enough resources to wall off cyberbullying. A reel in which he converted a churidar into a shirt drew a wave of mockery. “Ignoring the social stigma is not easy. But I always consider it positively. If you put negative comments on my post, that also increases my engagement,” he says.
He connects online bullying to the dismissal he encountered growing up when he told people he wanted to work in fashion. “Bullying starts from your circle. The crafts I was doing were always a headache for others until I got featured in newspapers and people started seeing my achievements.”
There is a satisfaction in his life now. The boy who wanted to be a fashion designer and was told — in the way that 90s Kerala told its sons — that fashion meant tailoring and tailoring was no career for him, now gets invited to fashion institutes to run workshops. He once spent every Saturday morning couriering his handmade orders, carrying what he had made with his own hands across a city that had not yet noticed him. He still works only on weekends, creates crafts out of cloth that other people discarded and flowers that cost almost nothing.
Find Amal S Pillai on Instagram: @amsham_handmade