Bandhani is counted in knots. The cloth is pinched into thousands of tiny points with a fingernail grown long for the purpose, each one bound in thread, and the bound points resist the dye to leave a white dot. This dupatta carries roughly forty-two thousand of them and took eleven days to tie.
Tied by Sakinaben Khatri in Mandvi and dyed in Jamnagar, where the water has historically given Bandhani its clearest reds. It arrives still knotted and folded, as it should - open it out slowly and the pattern appears. The dots will never be perfectly even, which is how you tell hand-tied work from a printed imitation.