Loom Vastra — Handloom weaving and handwoven cloth | loomvastra.com
The main handloom cloth types share one set of physical limits but differ in yarn count, weight, width and the clusters that weave them.
Cotton is the baseline. Handloom cotton is woven from 40s-80s yarn, and shirting-weight cloth comes to 120-180 g/m². A weaver produces 2-5 m of it in a 6-8 hour day at 10-20 picks a minute.
Muslin is the light end of the range: a sheer cloth of 60-100 g/m². Its famous ancestor, Dhakai muslin, was historically woven from yarn as fine as 200-300s — counts far beyond anything in regular production today.
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The saree is a format rather than a fibre: 5.5 m of cloth, 1.15-1.25 m wide, with a 0.75-0.8 m blouse piece at one end. It comes off looms built 115-125 cm wide, behind warps of about 3,600 ends at 80 per inch.
Ikat and silk carry the best-known protected names. Pochampally ikat received a geographical indication tag in 2005; the Banarasi sari followed in 2007. A GI tag ties the name to its weaving cluster, which gives buyers a second verification alongside the physical checks.
Each type can be verified with the same toolkit: the six checks in How to Identify Handloom Fabric, built on the loom numbers compared in Handloom vs Powerloom.
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