A Making Friday in Jaipur

Over the past couple of years, I have been lucky enough to travel to Jaipur with Ace Camps, teaching about pattern generation, and learning the traditional art of block printing. (You can see lots more about my Jaipur trips here and here.)

I followed up my first Jaipur trip with a release of three gorgeous scarves in 2015, traditionally blockprinted in natural dyes on fine dupatta cotton (above). When I returned to the same printing facility a year later, I had a bit of a brainwave: I selected all the wooden blocks I liked best, and spent time taking impressions of all of them.

I didn’t realise at the time how valuable a resource that turned out to be, but when I got home, I had a wonderful bank of woodblock impressions at my disposal, which I used to create the ‘Trinity’ and ‘Weft’ scarves, which we released earlier this year.

Trinity (left) is classic block printing, done the old-fashioned way, using vegetable dyes and traditional wooden printing blocks, while Weft (right) is an exciting departure into the even more ancient world of mud resist printing and indigo dying, which you can read all about here.

Now I’ve come up with another idea for that ‘sampler’ scarf I printed, so keep you eyes peeled for the next installment of this tale…