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You know the one. Dried pasta glued to cardboard, spray-painted gold, with a school photo in the middle and your name written in that wobbly, too-big handwriting you had when you were seven. He kept it. Maybe it moved from the fridge to a drawer to a box somewhere, but it never got thrown away. Because it wasn't about the macaroni. It was about the fact that someone made it specifically for him, sat down and thought about him, spent time on it. That instinct to make rather than buy, to give something that carries the trace of the hands that put it together doesn't go away when we grow up. It just gets harder to act on. That's what this edit is. Five objects, all made by hand, for five kinds of fathers. They are the kind of things that earns a permanent spot on his desk, the kind that becomes part of the landscape of his daily life, that he glances at without thinking about it, until someone visits and asks what it is and he gets to tell the story. None of them were made in a rush. None of them are last-minute fillers. They're the grown-up version of the macaroni frame - objects that say, without saying it - “I thought about you. I chose this for you specifically.”   01. The Ranthambore Tiger - For the father who protects. / Desk piece. The Mriga collection comes from Sawai Madhopur - the district that borders Ranthambore National Park, one of the last wild tiger reserves in India. The artisans who make these pieces live close enough to that forest to know it not as spectacle, but as neighbour. The tiger in this tradition is not ornament. It is acknowledgement of something older and stronger than us that still moves through the world if we leave space for it. The Ranthambore Tiger is hand-shaped in Sawaii black terracotta, a clay that fires dark and dense, with a surface that holds the marks of the hands that made it. It sits low & watches the room. It will look exactly right on a desk, between the books and the papers, as if it always belonged there. 02. Kapidhvaja - The father who has an eye for art / Framed wall piece. Kapidhvaja - In this piece, Ram and Hanuman are rendered in Togalu Gombeyaata, the leather shadow puppet tradition of Karnataka. Hand-cut, hand-painted, jointed at the limbs so they can move. The relationship between Ram and Hanuman is one of the great stories of devotion, not devotion as servitude, but as the kind of love that asks nothing back and moves mountains when it needs to. It hangs on a wall, but it tells a story every time someone asks. These puppets were made to perform by firelight, their translucent leather skins catching the flame and throwing their silhouettes large against temple walls. Framed, they hold that same quality - luminous, layered, full of detail that reveals itself slowly. 03. The Terracotta Cooking Pot - For the father who cooks. / Kitchen shelf. Not every father's story is written in stone or mythology. Some of it is in the kitchen, in the smell of something that takes two hours and cannot be rushed, in the particular silence of a Sunday morning when someone who loves you is cooking. Terracotta is the oldest cooking vessel in the world. Clay pots regulate heat differently from metal, distributing temperature evenly through the walls. Food cooked in terracotta tastes different. More patient, somehow. This pot is made by hand, fired in traditional kilns. It will need to be seasoned before its first use - soaked, oiled, heated slowly. After that, it improves with every meal. It lives on the kitchen shelf, earns its place. 04. Kunisawa Journals - For the father who writes things down. / Desk piece. Coming soon - contact us to order. There is a kind of father who keeps a record. Not a formal diary, more like a notebook that lives on the desk or bedside table, where things get written before they slip away. A line from something he read. A decision he is thinking through. Something one of his children said that was too good to lose. Kunisawa notebooks are made in Japan, where the act of writing by hand is taken as seriously as any other craft. The paper holds ink cleanly, resists bleed, makes the writing feel like it matters. It sits on the desk beside the tiger and the warriors, and it fills slowly. We're bringing Kunisawa to Handmade Tales because craft is craft, wherever it's made. These notebooks aren't yet listed on our site but if your father is the kind who writes things down, reach us directly and we'll take care of it. 05. The Dokra Warriors - For the father who carries the lineage. / Desk or shelf piece. Dokra is one of the oldest metalworking traditions on earth - lost-wax casting, practised in the tribal belts of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and West Bengal, for at least 4,500 years. The Mohenjo-daro dancing girl, one of the most recognised artefacts of the Indus Valley Civilisation, was made this way. The warriors in this piece stand in a row. This piece reflects a simple reality: we survive, evolve, and endure together.They belong on a desk, or a shelf, or anywhere that gets seen every day. The kind of object that earns its place slowly, and then becomes impossible to imagine the room without. "If any of these objects feel like they belong in your father's world or yours, you know where to find us!"                                                         - Saranya Padmanabhan                                                                                      Handmade Tales - Where craft becomes the conversation.

The thought behind this collection goes back to July 2019, long before Handmade Tales came into existence. In a small corner of our then office room, I had hung two Tholu puppets - Rama and Sita against a bright yellow wall. They were suspended from the ceiling with threads and cello tape (yes, I’m not very good at DIY), and each had a small motion-activated puck light behind it, lighting up every time we walked past. It turned into a beautiful installation, one that always caught attention during home visits with friends. And yet, it took several years for it to find its way into our collection. From the beginning, I knew I didn’t want to simply showcase the puppets.I wanted to bring the theatre of the puppet show into a frame, not just the form, but the experience. The design, prototyping, and execution went through countless iterations. But more than that, this collection felt different from anything we had worked on before. Perhaps it’s the depth of the stories it carries, or the weight of the tradition it comes from but as I worked on it, I found myself approaching it with a different kind of care. Being a curator comes with a responsibility.It feels like being a custodian of a fragment of history. And while my vision has always been to reinterpret traditional artforms for modern homes, it was important to me that in doing so, we did not strip away its meaning but allowed it to remain what it has always been. The selection The selection of pieces became the most important part of this process. We intentionally chose to include both Tholu Bommalata and Togalu Gombayata forms, centering the collection around key characters from the Ramayana - Sita, Rama, Hanuman, and Ravana. But rather than presenting them in their simplest forms, we wanted each piece to hold its own narrative even as a standalone object. That’s how these came to be: KapidhvajaSita - JanakanandiniHanuman in LankadhahanaRavana - Dasamukha As I spent time researching the characters and their poses, some stayed with me in unexpected ways.One that I keep returning to is the Kapidhvaja form of Hanuman. Hanuman could have fought alone, he who burned Lanka single-handed chooses instead to become a foundation.The most powerful being in the Ramayana becomes, in that moment, a pedestal for his lord.It is perhaps one of the most complete expressions of bhakti, the strength placed entirely in service of something beyond oneself.There’s something quietly profound about that.Not just in mythology, but in how we think about strength even todaythat it is not always about standing above, but in choosing to support, to hold, to stand beside. The framing The framing is what makes this a "Handmade Tales exclusive". The intent was always to bring the entire theatre home.   After countless attempts and conversations with multiple framers, we finally found someone who understood the vision. Every element was carefully considered. The teak wood frame as the shell.The stretched khadhi cloth as a reference to the traditional performance screen.The concealed lighting, echoing the flames of oil lamps.The puppet itself suspended from above, allowing it to move gently, almost like it’s still part of a performance. The first time I saw the prototype in person, it felt surreal. Watching it emerge from the dim corners of the workshop and come into light & seeing it not as an idea anymore, but as something tangible was a moment I won’t forget. And now, as I walk past the Kapidhvaja piece in my home, I find myself returning to it often. Not just for the theatre or the craft but for the meaning it holds. What began as an attempt to recreate a form of storytelling has, in many ways, become something more personal. And I couldn’t be more proud of that. Read more about the craft & our prodtcs here - Shadow Puppet Collection                                         - Saranya Padmanabhan - Founder & Creative Director