A small city near Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, is known for its centuries old art of textile printing using natural dyes and handcarved wooden blocks. The tradition of bagru block printing has been kept alive by “Chippa community.”, who have been practicing this since many generation. Chippa is derived from word chapa which means impression.
The process involves many steps and multiple days of work. that starts from Block Carving
- Block Carving
- Washing Fabric
- Fabric Treatment using Harad solution
- Dye Preparation using natural extracts or pigment.
- Spreading and fixing fixing on long padded printing table.
- Printing with a block and colour
- Sun-drying and repeating process for another block or colour
- Steaming completed fabrics
- Washing, drying, starching and ironing
The fabric used is mainly mul-cottons, kota-doriya cotton and Chanderi silk-cottons.
Fabric Treatment and Block-Printing
Just like many other similar pre-industrial era, labour-intensive work, this traditional textile-printing industry is also suffering set-backs due to fast fashion, low-cost machine made fabrics.
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Source
Bagru, the Traditional Hand Printed Textile of Jaipur by Meena Batham