Vardi Maintenance

[jasmin21]

Hi,

I wanted to know what the best ways of organizing/cleaning vardi. We have had many broken and overflowing suitcases over the past few years and our system is honestly not the best. Currently, we have individual bags for each vardi thrown into a big suitcase and some in trash bags. I have seen some teams keep vardi in dry cleaning bags and maintain it very well. If y'all could drop some dope advice that would be great.

 

[srazdan]

At Cornell, we did the following...

1. Each vardi color had its own dry cleaning bag so, for example, red guy and red girls vardi would be in the same bag. Each vardi had its own hanger. For girls, we had the chunni, kurta, pajama, and vest on the hanger and for guys, we had the kurta, chaadar, and vest on it.
2. We had two bags - one guys and one girls. In each bag, we had individually wrapped ziplock bags for each color in which we kept all of our accessories (kenta, phumman, patti for guys, tikka for girls etc.)
3. We had a separate pagh box where we put all of our paghs post punni'ing.
4. After performances, we turned our costumes inside out and hung them on their hangers to let them breathe.
5. Every year, we got our costumes dry cleaned at a place where they have lots of desi customers and are used to dry cleaning similar clothes.

Hope this helps!

 

[ampal]

^ Similar to above:
- Each vardi color has it's own dry cleaning bag which includes all of it's pieces: Vest, Kurta, Chadra, and Chunni's (although our chunni's are just always attached to the vests). For the boys, same thing except the pagh. All of this is in a big suitcase.
- Ziplog bags labeled as "red boy" or "red girl", exactly like above.
- We used to have single color vardiyan (not a lot of white) and I honestly used to just throw the Kurta and the Chadra in the washing machine on delicate after a couple of performances. That's how we kept them clean, and never got damaged. The only thing I wouldn't throw in the washing machine are the vests.