India Textile Tour---Day 6

Starting a piece, drying overhead

Feeling more like I'll live today. After breakfast we set off out of town to Bagru. This is the site of the Texcraft Park, were Jaipur Bloc members are reducing the environmental impact of textile production by creating a truly eco-friendly industrial site. Rain water is collected, solar power used for cleansing the water, and all waste water collected and cleaned of industrial discharge. The site houses many different companies and we visited two that do block prints as well as dyeing, especially indigo.

Five blocks to make the design

I will never look at block printing in quite the same way again. There is so much labor involved in a piece, depending on how many times the fabric is stamped. The minimum number of different blocks used is about three, but we saw one set that had seven blocks, which means that each area on the fabric was stamped seven times to produce the proper pattern and colors.

 

All environmentally safe dyes

The indigo pot--9 feet deep

Beautiful indigo

Dyeing the old fashioned way

After lunch we went to the Village Bagru to observe how things were done traditionally. We did not see any block printing, but we did see indigo dyeing. Seems to be done largely by women. No gloves were worn, so the ladies had very blue hands. The resist used is usually mud or mud/sawdust, and the fabric is just laid on the dirt to dry before being reimmersed in the dye pot or washed.

Laying out the indigo to dry

Final results, a wholesalers shop

One of the designs, the resist is mud

An amazingly complex block all handmade