From dyed yarn to tasselled pallu: The green on this saree is not printed on. In the Banaras handloom tradition the colour goes into the yarn long before the loom, and the warp laid out first ends as the pallu tassels.
Degumming the silk: Raw silk arrives stiff with sericin, the gum the silkworm spins around its filament. A mild soap and soda boil removes it, softening the yarn and releasing its lustre. That lustre matters here. The way this green shifts under light starts with how cleanly the gum comes out.
Dyeing the mehendi shade: The dyer, or rangrez, works to a shade card, usually building an olive-leaning green from yellow and blue dyes in a hot bath. Hanks are turned through the dye by hand so the colour takes evenly. Samples are checked wet and dry, since wet silk reads darker and a mehendi green easily overshoots into bottle green or slips toward lime.
Twisting and winding: The dyed yarn is twisted for strength and wound onto bobbins, with the warp usually given a firmer twist since it holds tension for weeks. Twisted silk of this kind is known as katan in Banaras.
Laying the warp: This is the slow heart of the job. Thousands of green threads are measured to the full length of the saree plus loom allowance, often stretched between stakes along a Varanasi lane or courtyard. Each thread of this tana runs the entire length of the drape, which is why the ground reads as one continuous green rather than a surface colour. One broken end means stopping to knot it back in.
Dressing the pit loom: Each warp end is drawn through the heddles and reed of a pit loom, where the weaver sits at floor level with the treadles in a pit below. A jacquard harness above is set to lift only the threads each buti needs.
Weaving the ground and the buti: The green weft, or bana, builds the ground pick by pick, and a separate golden zari thread is worked in to form each buti. With buti this sparse, most loom time goes into keeping the plain ground perfectly even. Turn the saree over. A small interlaced patch behind each buti points to kadhua work, while trimmed floats point to phekwa.
Finishing the tasselled pallu: At the pallu end, the unwoven warp ends are usually gathered, twisted and knotted into tassels by hand, so the green threads laid out in stage four finish the saree. A sparse buti saree like this typically spends a couple of weeks to over a month on the loom.
