How Long Did Your Embroidery Take?

Vee ThreadsHand embroidery · Bulandshahr, India

This kurta took 70 hours of hand-stitching.

A machine can stitch the same design in 1.4 h. Pick a garment and how heavily it's embroidered, and watch the two race.

Machine700 stitches/min

Hand15 stitches/min

Machine finished.

Garment

Embroidery

By hand

69.7 h

about 9 workdays of 8 h

Stitches

60,000

each one placed by hand

By machine

1.4 h

same stitch count

Difference

49×

slower by hand

What should those hours pay?

Hourly wage

₹6,967

Labour alone for this one piece, before fabric, thread, design, washing or shipping. Set the wage you think is fair.

That's as long as…

How we estimate this, and adjust the assumptions

These are estimates. Hours = stitch count ÷ hand speed, plus a fixed allowance for tracing the design, framing the fabric and finishing. Machine time = stitch count ÷ machine speed, with no setup time counted, which flatters the machine slightly.

Stitch counts depend on motif size, stitch type and thread thickness, so treat every number here as a typical range for each choice, not a measurement of one specific garment.

Where the defaults come from. Stitch counts are anchored on published estimates that a mid-level hand-embroidered kurta holds 50,000–100,000 stitches and heavy pieces 300,000 or more; other garments are scaled by area. Hand speed of 15 stitches a minute sits inside the range implied by reports of a 3,000-stitch motif taking 2–3 hours and a kurta taking 100+ hours of handwork. Machine speed of 700 stitches a minute reflects the 600–750 most commercial machines actually run at, below their advertised maximum.

Sources: Saroj Jain · Chikankaar · Craft Tribe · The Citizen · ZDigitizing

Hand speed (stitches/min)

Machine speed (stitches/min)

Tracing & finishing (hours)