Loom Vastra — Handloom weaving and handwoven cloth | loomvastra.com
Six measurements — width, selvedge, regularity, weight, yarn count and the end-piece — take about seven minutes and settle how a cloth was woven.
Mill cloth can be finished to look handwoven, so appearance alone is not evidence. What a machine cannot easily fake is the set of physical limits that a human-worked loom imposes, and each check below targets one of those limits.
Check one is width: a handloom saree measures 1.15-1.25 m, because saree looms are built 115-125 cm wide. Check two is the selvedge: a shuttle loom turns the weft at the edge into a continuous self-edge, while air-jet machines cut each pick. The named failures are under-width cloth and cut-pick edge.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Check three is regularity: held to the light, hand-inserted picks — 10-20 a minute — vary slightly in spacing, while machine picks at 300-1,000 a minute form a dead-even grid. Check four is weight: a measured square of cotton handloom shirting comes to 120-180 g/m², and sheer muslin to 60-100 g/m².
Check five is yarn count: handloom cotton sits at 40s-80s, and anything claimed to be finer should be treated with caution, because 200-300s counts belong to historical Dhakai muslin. Check six, for sarees, is the end-piece: 5.5 m of cloth with a 0.75-0.8 m blouse piece woven in at one end.
Treat the six as a set. A fabric that passes width but fails weight, or shows a perfect grid under the magnifying glass, is mill cloth in handloom clothing. The numbers behind every check are laid out in Handloom vs Powerloom, and the cloth types they apply to are listed in Handloom Fabric Types.
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