Our Journey
Our kanthas are stitched by hands that know resilience. Our napkins are woven on wooden handlooms. Our scarves are dyed with indigo grown in Rangpur.
Every piece we carry at Looms to Rooms begins in Bangladesh, with crafts that are hundreds of years old and the artisans who are keeping them alive today. We bring their work into homes across North America, made by hand from natural materials, the way it always has been.
Our Promise
Transparency: Every piece comes with its story: the artisans who made it, their community, and the values behind it.
Natural, all the way through: Natural fibers, natural dyes, and no shortcuts or greenwashing, from the loom to your door.
Fair Trade Partners: People and relationships first. It is built on transparency, respect, and long-term partnerships.
The Threads of Bengal
Three hundred years ago, Bengal made more than half of all the textiles produced on the Indian subcontinent, and Dhaka was at the center of it. Its cloth traveled to the bazaars of Istanbul and Aleppo, and across Central Asia, where fine muslin was simply called "daka." It reached Europe too. The Dutch, English, and French each opened trading posts in Dhaka between 1663 and 1682 to buy it.
Every one of those textiles was spun, dyed, and woven by hand, from cotton, silk, and indigo grown on this land. Below are some of those crafts: what they once meant, who is bringing them back, and how they find their way into your home.
Kantha
Kantha is the quilt of the Bengali home. Women layer old saris, dhotis, and lungis, three to seven at a time, and quilt them together with a simple running stitch. Traditionally, kanthas carry a lotus at the center, with vines, animals, boats, and scenes of everyday life stitched around it.
But our kanthas are stitched by hands that know resilience. Many of the women at Basha came with nothing to fall back on, and those stories are still being stitched today.
Basha Boutique
At Basha, women turn worn saris into new kanthas as they build new lives. Most sign their work by embroidering their name into it, the kantha on your bed carries the story of the woman who made it. Basha Boutique was founded by Robin Seyfert. Robin moved to Bangladesh in 2006 to work on HIV awareness with the Mennonite Central Committee, and that work led her to women exiting prostitution with nowhere to turn. She opened a training program expecting to fill one class and ended up with 500 more names on the waitlist. When the women she trained couldn't find work anywhere else, she built Basha to employ them herself.
Basha now employs around 120 Bengali women, runs a daycare for 135 children, and operates a training and rehabilitation program for another 30 women across five cities. Their work centers on kantha, a traditional quilting technique that transforms discarded saris into something new, stitched entirely by hand. As Robin puts it, each artisan who transforms the worn cloth is rebuilding her own life at the same time. We carry these kanthas in our Heirloom collection. To learn more about the organization, Visit Basha Boutique.
Living Blue
Our kanthas don't end with Basha. In Goalpara, a farming village in Rangpur, Living Blue works out of a bamboo atelier. It started as a CARE Bangladesh project to revive the native indigo plant, Indigofera tinctoria, and to train artisans in kantha quilting and Japanese shibori tie-dye. When USAID funding was cut, 250 artisans lost their jobs overnight. Instead of letting the craft disappear, the community formed a cooperative, and Anowarul Haq, who had led the CARE program, saw it through so the artisans could work independently.
Our artisans have taken the kantha stitch further. The traditional running stitch has been refined and paired with two Japanese resist-dyeing arts. In shibori, cloth is folded, bound, or stitched before it goes into the dye, so the indigo cannot reach every part of it and a pattern is left behind. In arashi, which means "storm" in Japanese, cloth is wrapped around a pole and pressed together, leaving fine diagonal lines like driving rain.
Their kanthas combine Japanese arashi and shibori designs. Artisans stitch indigo-dyed khadi cotton in multiple layers, then design the stitching that holds them together. Most of these pieces take 8 to 12 weeks, depending on the design and size. We carry these kanthas in our Whites and Blues collections. Living Blue's most sought-after pieces are their scarves, so explore them all in our Scarves collection. You can always Visit Living Blue yourself.
Photos courtesy of Living Blue.
Artisan Hut
Most of our tableware and kitchen products come from Artisan Hut. Monju Haque founded it in 2002, after years in fair trade and social work, to support artisans who hand-weave, block-print, and embroider, and to give them economic independence. Today, more than 250 artisans across rural Bangladesh work with Artisan Hut to create these handloom fabrics.
Photos and video courtesy of Artisan Hut.
Jamdani
Jamdani survived. Woven by hand around Dhaka, its patterns are built into the cloth thread by thread on the loom, not printed or embroidered afterward, which makes it slow, painstaking work. The skill is still passed mostly from parents to children in home workshops, and in 2013 UNESCO recognized the traditional art of jamdani weaving as part of humanity's intangible cultural heritage.
Jamdani has always been worn, mostly as saris. We want to bring it into the home. A curtain or table linen in jamdani lets the light pass through those hand-built motifs every day, so the craft is lived with, not just saved for special occasions.
Coming December 2026: we are partnering with Motif, a Bangladeshi maker of handwoven fabrics and ethical home goods whose team has worked in fair trade since 1989, to bring jamdani curtains and home goods into our collections.
Muslin
For centuries, Dhaka was famous for muslin, a cotton cloth so fine it was described as woven air. It was spun from phuti karpas cotton grown along the Brahmaputra, and the finest grade could take a weaver around six months to finish. Mughal emperors and nawabs bought it for their courts. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the East India Company took control of Bengal's trade, and cheap machine-made cloth from British mills soon flooded the market. Over the following century the industry collapsed, and the knowledge of how to make the finest muslin was lost.
Today, muslin is finding its way back. In 2014, Drik launched Bengal Muslin, led by Saiful Islam. Its researchers traced the original phuti karpas cotton from dried leaves held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and worked with master weavers to rebuild the old tools and techniques, producing their first saris from a hybrid of the rediscovered cotton.
The government of Bangladesh followed with its own revival project, run by the Bangladesh Handloom Board under the Ministry of Textiles and Jute, with botanists from Rajshahi University helping to identify and grow the plant again. Dhaka muslin received geographical indication status in 2021, and the project has since trained more than 300 women as spinners and weavers in Narayanganj and Cumilla. Its second phase, running to 2027, is designed to bring private producers into the work.
We are following this revival closely. As muslin returns to production, we hope to partner with the people bringing it back, so the fabric Bengal was once famous for can find its way into your home again.
Closer to Home: Brooklyn
Our Brooklyn community shaped the wellness side of Looms to Rooms. Terra Wellness, led by Dr. Robyn Choi, played a key role. I met her during my yoga practice, and her guidance on lifestyle approaches that treat root causes rather than symptoms is unparalleled. Ashley founded NAKDBODI, also in Brooklyn, after her own struggles with allergies, asthma, and eczema. She makes minimalist skincare with no fillers and no fragrance, for skin like mine. Both are natural sources of nourishment, and we partnered to support each other in our community.
That's how Looms to Rooms came to be. Not a business plan or a checklist.
My hope is that every piece helps people see what it takes to bring long-forgotten art back into our homes, and how these social enterprises are reviving it so artisans can earn a living with dignity.
Ayesha, Toby, Solomon, and Raphael
Much love,
Ayesha