What began as a way to meet people in a new city, eventually became her calling. Paramjeet Bawa first discovered quilting in Kuwait over 15 years ago and is now a world-renowned quilter and teacher. She has held workshops all over the world including cities in the Middle East and Kenya.
Hoping to popularise the craft in India, Paramjeet recently held a four-day workshop at Tsala Studio in Bengaluru. Taking time out of her busy day, the award-winning quilter talked about how she chanced upon this craft, discovered teaching and her plans for the future.
“In Punjab there’s a saying, ‘If you’ve filled water, you’ve drunk it. If you’ve cooked food, you’ve eaten it. If you’ve washed clothes, you’ve worn it.’ Which means you’ve basically done nothing that carries you forward. My mother wouldn’t let me sit idle, so I took up embroidery and thread work,” recalls Paramjeet, who adds that she took to this craft naturally. But it was only when she moved to Bangladesh, where she was exposed to more embroidery and similar work, did she realise how much there really was to the art form. “It is humbling to know what others are doing once you start getting into it because you realise you really don’t know all that much,” she says. But it was only when she moved to Kuwait later that she met Leela Cherian, an art quilter who she considers her inspiration, that she was drawn to quilting.
But with no art education besides having drawn botanical and zoological diagrams during her MPhil in Biological Sciences, she began taking up whatever art classes she could find, be it baking, silk painting or watercolours until she finally mustered the courage to join a quilt group. It began with a challenging couple of months because of all the terminology and technical jargon. “There are lot of ‘b’ words in the quilting world like basting, binding, borders, backing and you’re lost in it. I took almost two years to make my first quilt. It was a traditional quilt and I realised I don’t like sewing straight lines. I am a perfectionist and do have a keen eye but I end up going too fast and when the lines are not straight, it irritates me. So I decided that I would to do art quilts,” she says, but admits it was nice to have started off with traditional quilts because that way she learnt all the rules of the craft.
Her teaching career also began similarly, by chance. She may have thought quilting was hard at first, soon discovered that teaching was harder. She first tried her hand at it when she was asked to teach tatting, a technique for hand-crafting lace. “I could do it mindlessly so I said okay but when I sat down to figure it out, I realised I could not. I had to go backwards, slow down my motions, see how my hands were moving, which thread I was pulling, what tensions I was creating. So for teaching, just knowing is not enough. You have to really dissect what you are doing, pull it apart and open it up for your own understanding and then make a step wise process for the students who are generally raw beginners,” explains Paramjeet. She then adds, laughing, “If I am strict like a maths teacher, my students will run away just the way I ran from maths. I had to make it easy for them to understand and learn. So I try to be encouraging to all my students”
Although, now a winner of multiple awards and renowned for Dust Strom, a quilt so dramatic in its colour play she won the most of awards for it, Paramjeet’s long-term goal now is to put India on the world map for this craft. Currently, she is in talks with various quilting groups across the country and Paramjeet hopes to organise an exhibition in India over the next couple of years which brings together all the quilters in the country.
