Leila Atelier— is a hand crafted textile studio based in Cape Town, South Africa

By delving deep into the history of textiles and the craftspeople who make them while on an extended trip to India in 2018, Leila became entirely enraptured with cloth and the stories it carries, researching & exploring these traditions physically in India. When she returned home to South Africa she continued by researching about traditional textiles African.

In early 2020 she began weaving lessons in Cape Town, an activity which she dedicated almost my entire Coronavirus lockdown sabbatical to. In July of the same year she purchased her first floor loom and dedicated an unimaginable amount of hours, days, months to learning the craft, developing textiles with integrity and then products which would be both desirable & useful.

As the world re-emerged to some semblance of the before, she decided to throw all caution to the wind, making a break from her previous career as an art director in the film industry and giving her all to the burgeoning passion of materializing a life surrounded by beautiful, resonant textiles.

Over the next couple of years she's outgrown her studio several times, employed a studio assistant and then trained her to weave, built up a network of incredible clients and begun collaborating with other local Handweavers to craft products through which they hope to share the beauty of this craft, and the deep love that resonates in it.

Read more on the kanju journal about Leila's story.