48 Arts & Crafts Private Limited

Other Details

tikoppaka Products: Toys, Cutlery, Jewellery, Bridal boxes, Stationery, Jars, Wind chimes, UtilitiesTools: Planer, Saw, Boring tools, Cutting tools, Hand drills, Brushes, Files, Power and hand lathe

Production Clusters: Etikoppaka, Yelamanchili, Dimili, Narayanapuram, Kailaspatnam

What does this difficult to pronounce and alien word called ‘Etikoppaka’ mean?

It literally means a ‘cluster of houses by the bank of a river’. It is a village 65 KMs from Vishakapatnam with a population of about 12,000 including 200 + artisans. However, over time it has gained fame across the World for its unique craft-form – Etikoppaka, named after the village. What is so unique about this craft? It is made of the softwood (Wrightia tinctoria / Ankudu Karra) and coated with tree-based lac colours. This seasoned wood is evolved in circular shape on a lathe machine with skillful manipulation of the tools. Subsequently the tools are replaced by lac and the circular pieces are coloured due to the friction created by pressing the lac against the rotating wooden ware. Once the coloured pieces are ready they are assembled to come up with a brilliant piece of craft. We are sure all engineers or otherwise who ever worked on a lathe will appreciate the degree of skill required to master it and use it to turn wood into beautiful art-pieces.

How do you claim these colours are natural? Is it that easy to make natural dyes?

Nope. It is not at all easy to make these natural dyes. Making each dye is a complicated and unique process. Each base colour is derieved from a different parts (read trunk, leaves, roots, fruits, flowers, seeds etc) of various plants. To make a specific colour the respective plant-parts are collected, dried and powdered. This powder is mixed with water and boiled until it forms a thick solution and starts producing lather. The ratio of water and the temperature and duration of heating are decided based on the shade of the colour required. This concentrate is then cooled and filtered to mix with lacquer. The mix is then dried to convert into solid lac blocks convenient to handle during coloring. This is the simplest of all the process, mind you unique color-making is a more systematic and a complex process.