The Treasures of Delhi

There are not many cities in the world that have a lineage like Delhi. As I have mentioned in some of my previous posts there is not a thing in the world that is difficult to find here. All you have to do is go in the back lanes of the old city and ask shopkeepers related to the trade and most often they will point you to the right place or tell you where to hunt and whom to ask.

Since I had got some woven labels done for branding my products, I was hunting for metallic letters that I could use to stamp my name onto the rubber tubes and other materials. I went to a part of old Delhi  called Chawri Bazar, it is famous for printing and related stuff and after about half an hour I got to a place where I could purchase what I was looking for.

This shop is full of history all over and has been running as is since the last 70 or so years, though with the advent of computers it is way past its prime but there is just so much to seep in from the past and think what it must be in its hay days. I'll leave the details of the history for a later post and let these pictures do the talking for now.

This gentleman runs the show now

Pictures of two earlier generations on the wall (towards left)

Different fonts and alphabets

They have been sitting in these drawers since decades

A closer look

All these racks date back to pre-independence India

Hidden surprise

After I finished washing and cleaning the inner tyre tubes yesterday, I just let them stand on the terrace to drip and dry out. They did not take a long time to dry out even in such humid conditions, I'd say about 30 minutes or so, I bet in the Dry summer heat of Delhi it would have been no more than 5.

I decided to cut one of the tubes on the terrace itself rather than my work table as I knew some of the tubes had a hole or two and all of them had a big cut where the air valve once existed, and water certainly went inside from some of these cuts. I did not want to cut them and see the water dripping inside the house.

Cutting through the inner seam

Cutting it across, to make small manageable pieces

Once I cut the tube to manageable pieces, I was in for a big surprise. The inner surface wall of the tubes was not as smooth as the outer surface and it had a white powdery thing sticking to it. I tried cleaning it with a damp cloth, but the powdery surface just repelled the water away just like an oiled surface would do.

Powdery surprise all over the inner surface

The pieces on the right in the picture above have been cleaned with a damp cloth, but they are still not totally free of the white powder. To get them perfectly clean I had to wash them again, just like I had the outer surface earlier. The smaller manageable pieces made the task a little easier than washing the whole tube as it is fairly heavy, and going forward I will first cut the tube into smaller pieces and then wash the pieces rather than the heavy tube.

Clear of everything now :)

Rain to the resque

The rain gods opened up over the Delhi sky this week and I was finally able to move forward with my inner tyre tubes which have been quietly siting for more than a month now. Though it has been raining quite consistently during the monsoon season this year, but somehow whenever I was home or had free time it was eluding me.

It was way easier to wash them on the open roof top rather than my last attempt in a confined space. I still did not know what exactly to expect as this was my first time doing something like this. Though it went fairly well but I did learn a few tricks during the whole course and will incorporate them next time so as to make things a little easier.

Cleaning the tubes up was just not that simple and easy as I had thought it would be, it took me a few hours to clean 6 odd tubes. Of course the next time it will be a bit faster as I will not be doing all the experimentation I did this time around.

Here are some more pictures of the whole exercise.

I had seven big tubes in this sack and it weighed over 50 kilos

Scrubbing them to break the black tyre dust

A cloth was too soft for them, so here comes the hard brush

more scrubbing

even more scrubbing

Final rinse with fresh water 

Set out to drip and dry

Branding (Blog)

Lately I have been reading a little about branding as it has helped me communicate more with my students in the pattern-making class. I feel it is very important to discuss something else, which is relevant  besides the topic in the classroom as it helps students to express ideas better and be more open. They might not discuss everything with the teacher who is teaching them about marketing in general and branding in particular.

I had started exploring the topic so as to help my small (still non existent) brand to be on the right path. My last post itself was about branding, as I had got my woven labels done to brand my creations it is still very much a work in progress.

This week I decided to try to brand this blog a little better and I was able to accomplish a bit with all the help from this wonderful resource called Tips for New Bloggers. It has hundreds of well laid out explanations about what you need to do to change the default settings on your blog. I was also able to use a great program called Picnik, it lets you do a ton of stuff to your photographs all for a princely sum of ZERO.

Here are some pictures of the old and the new look;

With the default template from Blogger

With some basic changes to the template

and after a few hours of experimenting;

Does it look a little well branded than before?

Branding (Labels)

After the hiccups, stalls and other delays I have started moving forward with my directional plan. At this stage I am way behind where I was to be at this stage, as I ended up doing a lot of different thing than what I had written down in my directional and business plan at the starting of the year.

In order to brand my creations in the right way I did get a logo designed in February, but after that nothing really happened to the design. My plan was to have the logo developed on various other formats (business card, labels, hang tags, banner on my blog, etc. etc.) which could be used to brand leftover in the right way.

Labeling is one of the most effective and affordable ways to reinforce my brand into customers and prospects minds, and it is not very expensive to do. One great article that gives some insight into labeling by Rosana Levesque (who is an expert in online marketing) is Brand Your Business With Custom Labels. It is fairly concise and shows why it is import to brand and how custom labels will help you achieve that.

This week I did get some labels made with my logo, and I am extremely happy with how they turned out. I am in the process of doing a few new patterns, but my summer teaching gig and the smart students there are keeping me occupied right through the week.

Here are some pictures.