Local customs – Page 2 – Judy and Valerie On the Road

Block printing workshop in Barmer

On the way to Jaisalmer we stopped at Barmer to attend a block printing workshop run for us by a small textile printing company called Panihari.

This was very exciting as one of the workers first showed us the process and then we were each given a metre of cloth and helped to create our own prints. We each just used two different blocks one for the edge and one for the centre, but they would use several wooden blocks to create a detailed pattern with several colours (see the Anokhi post). The solution we pressed onto the material was made of lime and gum. This will act as a ‘resist’ so that when the material is dyed the patterned sections will remain white.

They will dye our prints with indigo and send them on to us in Jaisalmer … watch this space.

Hand weaving in Raisar

On our way to Bikaner we stopped in a village and went into the home of a family who generate their own wool, yarn and fabrics.

They take the wool from their sheep and camels, spin this into yarn, dye it, weave it on hand looms creating fabrics, and then create products such as shawls. They then sell these to the local cooperative who are then able to sell it on.

Evidently Bikaner is the largest wool producing area in Asia.

They also made us some millet roti which are eaten there with s small curry- it was delicious.

Block printing – Bagru village

We visited a small block printing factory in a village called Bagru near Jaipur where they use a technique called Mud Resist.

Initially they create a paste made of of earth, water, wheat powder and gum A wooden block with a carved pattern is pressed into the paste and then onto white cotton material. Then sawdust is sprinkled on the top and print is left to dry.

The fabric is then dyed in cold dye- first in a solution to enable the dye to take, and then into the dye itself. In this case the dye was made from scraps of iron producing a grey colour.

The process can then be repeated pressing the mud resist solution onto the parts of the fabric which are to be kept at that dyed colour. The whole dying process is repeated as many times as required. Eventually the resist solution is washed off and the printed fabric remains

and of course they had a shop, and of course there was a natural progression

Anokhi museum of hand printing

You may have heard of Anokhi shops where they sell beautiful clothes using traditional Indian fabrics for contemporary designs. Well in Jaipur Anokhi have a very interesting museum of hand printing. It’s housed in a beautifully restored haveli and takes you through different printing techniques. They have a collection of fabrics and also have some people giving demonstrations of techniques. One man was doing block printing whilst another was making the wooden blocks used.

Sending a parcel

After our first week in India we concluded that we’d brought too many clothes and our bags were too heavy, so we decided to parcel some up and send them home.

In England you would wrap the parcel in brown paper, address it and take it to the post office, so off to the post office we went. But in India, parcels have to be sown up in calico by a tailor. We were sent across the road to find a tailor and got our parcel sown into a big package. Then the To and From addresses had to be written on with a special red pen provided by the PO staff. Sending a parcel to the UK wasn’t cheap- Rs2,600 (£30) for a parcel weighing 3.3kg, but at least that’s lessened our load.

Here’s the tailor sewing up our parcel

Fascinating!