Women Artisans of Uttarakhand — The Hands Behind Every Made of Hands Product
- Apr 25
- 6 min read
By Tanu Bhatt, Founder | Made of Hands | Handmade Crochet & Knit Gifts from Almora, Uttarakhand
Every product you see on this website has a pair of hands behind it.
Not a machine. Not a factory. Not an algorithm optimising for cost per unit. A pair of human hands — steady, skilled, patient — belonging to a woman who lives in the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand and who learned to knit and crochet the way most valuable things are learned: slowly, from someone who loved her enough to teach her.
This is the story of those women. And of how women artisans of Uttarakhand became the heart of everything Made of Hands is.
Where Made of Hands Was Born — A Pair of Orange Socks
It started with something small. A pair of orange socks.
My mother gave them to me one winter to keep my feet warm. She told me her mother — my grandmother — had knitted them by hand. I remember the first time I wore them: they fit perfectly, they were soft in a way that shop-bought socks never are, and they felt warm in a way that had nothing to do with the wool.
I was wearing something made by someone who loved me. And you could feel it.
That feeling stayed with me for a long time. I kept asking myself: why don’t more people get to experience this? The comfort of something genuinely handmade, made with care, made by real hands? That one question is where Made of Hands began.
Who Are the Women Artisans Behind Every Stitch?
I didn’t know much about knitting myself, so I did what anyone would do — I called my friend’s grandmother. She sat with us, taught us about yarn, about needles, about how to read a stitch. She was patient in the way only grandmothers can be. And through her, we got connected to other women in the area — women from the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand who knew how to knit and crochet beautifully, but who didn’t have a way to turn that skill into steady income.
These are the women artisans of Uttarakhand who make every single Made of Hands product. They live in and around Almora — a quiet hill town nestled in the Kumaon hills, surrounded by forests and mountains, far from the noise of factory districts and e-commerce warehouses. They are mothers, daughters, grandmothers. They have families to care for, routines that matter to them, lives deeply rooted in their communities.
What struck me most when I first met them was this: they didn’t want to leave. They didn’t want to move to a city for factory work or compromise the lives they had built. They just needed work that could come to them — not the other way around.
So that became the heart of what we do.
How Crochet and Knitting Became a Source of Livelihood, Not Just a Hobby
Knitting and crochet have been practised in the hill communities of Uttarakhand for generations. For most of these women, the craft began as something domestic — making warm socks and caps for family members during winter, passing the skill from mother to daughter as naturally as any other part of growing up in the mountains.
What Made of Hands did was create a bridge between that skill and a market that wanted it. By connecting these women to customers across India who value handmade, ethically produced goods, we gave the craft an economic purpose it hadn’t had before. A beanie that once might have been made for a husband or child now earns its maker a fair wage. A crochet keychain that required an hour of careful work is now valued as the skilled labour it is.
The women work from their homes, at their own pace, on their own schedule. There are no supervisors, no fixed shifts, no commute. The work fits into their lives — not the other way around. And that, in a country where women in rural areas often face a stark choice between staying home and earning income, is genuinely significant.
The Skill That Goes Into a Single Handmade Product
When you hold a Made of Hands product — a handmade amigurumi plushie, a knitted woolen beanie, a crochet keychain — you are holding the result of hours of focused, skilled work. A single amigurumi frog involves dozens of individual crochet rounds, precise shaping decisions, careful stuffing, and finishing details that require a trained eye and a steady hand. A well-made knitted beanie requires consistent tension across hundreds of stitches and the experience to know when a stitch has gone wrong and needs to be undone.
This is not hobbyist craft. This is professional skill — the kind that takes years to develop and produces results that a machine genuinely cannot replicate. The slight variations in texture, the subtle differences in stitch between two similar products — these are not flaws. They are the marks of human hands at work. They are what makes each piece one of a kind.
What It Means When You Buy from Made of Hands
When you buy from Made of Hands, your money goes directly to the women who made your product. Not to a middleman. Not to a factory floor. Not to a warehouse algorithm. To a woman in Almora who spent real time — sometimes hours — making the exact thing you’re now holding.
Beyond the direct financial impact, every purchase is a vote for a different kind of economy. An economy that values skill over speed. That prioritises dignity over efficiency. That believes a woman in a Himalayan village deserves to earn from what she knows how to do beautifully — without leaving the home and community she’s built her life around.
We are not a charity. We are a business built on the belief that handmade products — made ethically, priced honestly, sold with full transparency about who made them — can compete with and outlast the fast fashion alternative. Every order placed on our website helps prove that belief right.
A Day in the Life of a Made of Hands Artisan
There is no single day that looks the same — and that’s partly the point. Our artisans work on their own terms.
Some work in the mornings after children leave for school, needles clicking steadily while the mountains are still quiet. Some work in the evenings after family dinner, the television on in the background, a cup of tea nearby. Some take on larger orders during quieter months and slow down during harvest or festival seasons. The work bends around life, not the other way around.
What’s consistent is the care. Every piece that leaves a Made of Hands artisan’s hands has been checked, re-checked, and finished with the attention that comes from pride in craft — not from an end-of-shift rush to hit a quota.
Why the Mountains Matter
Almora and the surrounding villages of Uttarakhand are not just a backdrop for our brand. They are the context in which the craft exists. The long winters here made warm knitwear not a luxury but a necessity — and that necessity shaped generations of women into skilled makers. The quiet of the mountains is in the work itself: unhurried, careful, made to last.
When one of our handmade mufflers or woolen socks arrives at your door, it carries something of that quiet with it. The altitude. The patience. The hands that understood, stitch by stitch, that what they were making was worth making well.
Be Part of Something Bigger
Made of Hands is a small business. We don’t have a warehouse full of inventory or a marketing budget the size of a fast fashion brand. What we have is a team of extraordinarily skilled women, a product they make with genuine pride, and customers who care about where things come from.
If you’ve read this far, you’re already one of those people.
Every purchase you make — a crochet keychain, a soft toy, a handmade beanie — supports a woman artisan in Uttarakhand and keeps a living craft tradition alive. That’s not marketing language. It’s just what’s true.
Shop the full Made of Hands collection at madeofhands.com/shop — and take home something made by hands that meant every stitch.
Use code FIRST10 for 10% off your first order.
Made of Hands — Made of love, made of hands. — Tanu Bhatt, Founder
Comments