Zardozi Masters of Lucknow
Before a House of Sissendi cushion cover, lampshade, or framed wall piece reaches a home, it passes through the hands of an artisan in Lucknow for days, sometimes weeks, at a time. The brand's new range of embroidered objects is built on this slowness, and on techniques that have been practiced in the city for generations: zardozi, dabka, and resham work.
What the techniques actually involve
Zardozi is metal embroidery — historically gold and silver wire, today more often a gilded metallic thread — worked into fabric with a fine hook called an *ari*, building up raised, dimensional motifs rather than flat stitched ones. Dabka uses a coiled metallic wire, couched onto the surface to catch the light in a way that flat thread cannot; it is what gives certain motifs their faceted, almost jewelled texture. Resham is silk thread embroidery, softer and more pictorial, often used for the figures, florals, and fine detailing that anchor a motif's centre.
Lucknow has been associated with this kind of embellishment for centuries, particularly through chikankari and the zardozi traditions that grew alongside it under royal patronage. House of Sissendi's pieces draw on that same lineage of needlework, but apply it to a contemporary set of objects — a cushion, a lampshade, a piece meant to be framed and hung rather than worn.
Watching the work happen makes clear how little of it is mechanical. Each motif starts as an outline on fabric. From there, an artisan builds it up stitch by stitch and coil by coil, working from a spool of thread and a small dish of cut metallic wire, with no two motifs ever turning out quite identical. A single oval panel, of the kind that becomes a cushion centre or the body of a lampshade, can take a full day or more on its own before it is anywhere near finished.
Why fair wages matter to how this is made
Hand embroidery of this kind is often invisible labour — the finished cushion or lampshade is what a customer sees, not the hours of close, precise handwork that went into it. House of Sissendi works directly with artisans in Lucknow rather than through layers of subcontracting, with the explicit aim of ensuring that the people doing this work are paid fairly for the time, skill, and eyesight it demands.
This matters for two reasons that are really the same reason. Practically, it is what keeps a centuries-old craft viable: artisans stay in the trade, and pass it on, when the work pays enough to be worth doing. And ethically, a piece described as handmade should mean that the maker was treated as such — paid for the actual labour involved, not for a fraction of it. For House of Sissendi, "traditional technique" is not just a description of the stitch; it is a commitment to the conditions under which that stitch gets made.
What this means for the object on your table
Every cushion cover, lampshade, and framed piece in this range carries the slight, deliberate irregularity of handwork — a curve that is not quite a machine's curve, a metallic coil that catches the light a little differently from its neighbour. That is not a flaw to be engineered out. It is the signature of a person's hands, paid fairly for the hours they gave to it, and it is what House of Sissendi is asking customers to value when they bring one of these pieces home.