ISLAMABAD: In Pakistan’s southern Sindh province, women work cotton scraps into a traditional form of textile art, called Rilli, a vivid patchwork quilt or bedspread, as they gather in small courtyards of rural homes after long days in the fields.
These women share stories, of love, hardship and resilience, as each stitch turns the fabric waste into heirlooms. It was this spirit of storytelling through sustainable traditional craft that drove Sana Khan to launch, ‘Earthy Murkey,’ a brand of handbags made from discarded fabrics and leather.
In 2019, when Khan, a 42-year-old academician, returned to Pakistan from Australia where she had been working for years as a retail training manager, she was pleasantly surprised by the government’s “no plastic movement,” which discouraged the use of plastic bags in markets.
She recalls that it was something that was being talked about a lot in the West and she was glad that her own country was also taking such important steps toward climate conservation, inspiring her to launch Earthy Murkey.
“So, people started questioning ‘how will we carry groceries etc.?’ So, the idea got inspired from there,” Khan told Arab News. “We just got a bag stitched, it was a simple orange jute bag and introduced it to the market.”
