Come on a craft tour to Kerala
Colouricious Holidays offer you the opportunity to travel the Kerala region of India and delve into the wonderful craft culture that has been thriving there for centuries. On this craft tour you will visit crafting centres participating in a a range of creative workshops all organised for your enjoyment. You won"t have to worry about a thing! Here are a few of the crafts you can expect to experience, ready to takeaway new skills for your own creative home projects.TASARA Centre for Creative Weaving
The TASARA Centre is located in the Beypore village of Kerala,along India’s west coast. ‘Tasara’ means ‘weaver’s shuttle’ in Sanskrit. The centre works to bring together both contemporary and traditional weavers and other textile artists to encourage both a respect for traditional forms and real innovation. The TASRA centre’s Artist in Residence programme has given studio space and facilities to support to artists and artisans throughout India for more than 25 years. And has jump-started the careers of many successful textile artists and painters.TASRA also provides extensive training opportunities in weaving and both traditional and batik dyeing, using natural dyes and pigments as well as modern chemical colours. Its annual textile workshops have become a gathering place for weavers and textile artists throughout India to meet, network and collaborate.
Pottery Making
Kolenchery is a small town in Kerala State, specifically a few kilometres east of Cocin in Ernakulam district, near India’s west coast. One of its most important features, as far as Colouricious Holidays is concerned, is the Pottery Making Unit which focuses on the traditional terra cotta pottery techniques of Kerala State. Not only is this an opportunity to see the works of some of India’s premier workers in terra cotta pottery, it is a chance to gain insight into the way this traditional crafting material (and a mixture of traditional and modern techniques) can be used to create art that is both thoroughly modern yet truly timeless.
Toddy Tapping
Throughout Kerala, toddy tapping is conducted in the same way it has been for hundreds if not thousands of years. The ‘palm toddy’ or simply ‘toddy’, is harvested from coconut palms without cutting down the coconuts – if they are instead carefully ‘tapped’, the milk inside will refill over time. In this way, a single tree can produce hundreds of litres of coconut milk each day. You’ll learn how this is accomplished, and also how to make a delicious palm toddy – even with purchased coconuts at home.
Kalaripayattu
Kalaripayattu is one of India’s oldest martial arts, and one of the oldest continuously practiced martial arts in the world. ‘Kalari’ means battle or battlefield, and ‘Kalaripayattu’ means ‘Practice in the Arts of the Battlefield’. Its written history is more than 2300 years old, but it is believed that many of the practices go back much further. It involves the use of what we would call mideval weapons, especially shields, spears, bows, swords and the more obscure silambam.
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Our creative holidays to Bhutan begin in London where you’ll fly to Delhi and then arrive in the sacred 
Learn, create, be happy!
Subsistence oriented economy of the tribes here is based on food gathering, hunting and fishing, thus, revolving around forests. While farming, they make use of a very simple technology and a simple division of labor often limited to the immediate family. But they lose out because their holdings are small and unproductive, lacking irrigation facility due to a hilly and undulating terrain.
Many tribes practice shifting cultivation or Podu Chasa, also known as slash and burn. They select a plot of land on a mountain slope, slash down all the trees and bushes and burn them to ashes. Spreading the ashes evenly over the land, they wait for the rains before planting their crops. Due to cultivation for two or three seasons on one plot of land the soil gets depleted and the tribes move on. It is a way of life for them.
vegetarianism. But a significant proportion of population yet relishes fish and other sea food delicacies like prawns, crabs and lobsters that are found in plenty at the vast coastline of the state. Cooked with little or absolutely no oil, Oriya food has a less calorific value.
Colouricious Holidays have lots of different holidays exploring India, Japan, Bhutan and Uzbekistan. We will be expanding this all the time with more
Bagru is a small village located near Jaipur, the capital City of Rajasthan. It"s home to the Chippa community who have been practicing a unique style of printing for more than 350 years. Colouricious holidays visited Bagru, running Bagru block printing workshops, working with traditional printers and helping support this ancient craft which faces threat from globalisation.
Scouring- locally called ‘Hari Sarana’
Dyeing is a process in which the dye reacts with two mordants at two different locations on the same print giving two different shades of colors. As mentioned earlier ‘alizarin’ is used as the dye throughout Rajasthan. The colours obtained in conjunction with the two mordants are red (with alum) and block (with ferrous). Dyeing is carried out in large copper vessels (‘tambri’) which are heated by wood fire. Alizarin is filled in small cloth-bags (‘potali’) and dipped in the vessel. The quantity of alizarin dye is calculated by the experienced dyer. ‘Dhawadi phool’, a local flower is boiled along with alizarin to avoid patches and staining. Once the dyed fabric is ready (usually it takes half-an-hour), it is taken out of the copper vessel and left on the ground for drying.
