Look at a pattern long enough. It ceases to be a mere decoration.
There’s a mystery about how repetition works. Our common sense relates repetition to boredom and predictability. But our observation reveals meaning.
The Pattern
Think about it.
The woven cane going to and fro and over in folds in an old wooden chair. The intricate, interlocked knots of a handmade rug crafted row by row months on end. Or even a simple geometric block print pressed into a soft cotton fabric. The motif lives on for hundreds of years, unchanged, uninterrupted.
But we don’t remember it because it was pretty. We remember it because someone at some point of time thought it is repeatable, durable, worthy of being made into a permanent feature. And it worked its way almost into our DNA.
That’s what a pattern is, an act of attention and endurance.
When we talk of textiles, patterns are born long before we see them on fabrics. They’re born way before the print or a weave. They are born when one notices rhythm in the world around us. And that person, at that point, may not even know they’ll create a pattern in future. They notice a shape or a cadence and decide to keep it.
The Making of the Pattern
While noticing a pattern is probably just observation and maybe curiosity too, keeping it is hard work. Patterns and motifs hardly appear on fabric by accident.
One fine day, someone will sit and meditate on it. They’ll draw it, perfect it and appreciate it. They’ll carve it into wood. They’ll do the math about how to create it on the handloom. They’ll burn the midnight oil stitching by hand. And they may get it wrong several times before they get it right.
A pattern carries all that observation, inspiration, meditation, hard work, failure and correction behind it…even when it becomes a digital print.
The Personification
And then, something shifts. The pattern is no longer a shape or a shade on a piece of cloth. As you don the garment that bears the pattern, the garment becomes a reflection of you.
Suddenly, the garment is a scarf that smells of your grandmother, a saree border that your mother still prefers wearing for weddings, a handkerchief that your husband always keeps, or a shirt that someone complimented you on just when you were having a bad day.
The patterns that already came in potent with stories, become your stories as you embrace them.
MŪLA’s Pattern Story
The personification of patterns is what we think over the most at MŪLA.
We aren’t simply creating fabrics, designs, and patterns or a fabric. We’re handing you a memory that spans ages. And we’re inviting you to add your chapter to it.
Maybe where the world looks at repetition in patterns as cliché, we think it may be the very repetitions that pull us in. When we see something that we recognize; when something feels familiar, maybe it is the story that wants to engage with us.
An observation becomes a pattern.
A pattern becomes a story.
And eventually, the story becomes ours.