Chapter 18: Product Diversification and Modern Applications

While the saree — and specifically the Ilkal saree — remains Kasuti's most traditional and culturally significant application, contemporary practice has extended the craft well beyond bridal and festival garments.

Garments Beyond the Saree

• Blouses (ravike), children's bonnets (kunchi), kurtas, shawls, and dresses now regularly carry Kasuti embroidery, applying the same four-stitch vocabulary at varying scales.
• Contemporary designers have also combined Kasuti with other embroidery and embellishment traditions — appliqué work and mirror-work among them — to create hybrid festive pieces distinct from strictly traditional Kasuti.

Accessories and Home Décor

• Totes, bags, belts, and small accessories carrying Kasuti motifs have become increasingly common as the craft has been marketed to a wider, including international, audience.
• Home décor applications — cushion covers, table linens, door curtains, and wall hangings — allow smaller Kasuti motifs to be produced and sold as standalone decorative pieces, broadening the craft's commercial base beyond garment production alone.

Woven (Jacquard) Kasuti-Inspired Motifs

A notable direction in applied textile research has explored weaving Kasuti-style motifs directly into cloth using jacquard looms, rather than embroidering them by hand after weaving — an attempt to revive and modernise Ilkal handloom production by using new yarns (including cotton, modal, bamboo, and banana fibre blends) and swivel-weave techniques to reproduce motifs such as the Murgi zig-zag as part of the weave structure itself. This kind of work sits at the boundary between embroidery and weaving and represents one documented experimental approach to keeping Kasuti-derived design commercially viable at scale, distinct from — and not a replacement for — traditional hand embroidery.