These beautiful Kalamkari prints are created only on pure cotton fabric with hand-carved wooden blocks. The blocks are designed by artisans first on paper, and then later transfered and carved by hand into the final printing block(s). Often a design will utilize two or more colors and so multiple blocks will be carved for the completion of such a design. While the artisans are continually creating new designs for their fabric, there are also stores of old blocks so that designs can be printed at regular intervals and the production of their fabric can keep up with the demands of their customers. Once a set of printing blocks are ready to be used they are brought to the printing workshop where prepared-fabric is ready to be printed.
The fabric is prepared for the printing process by first treating it in a mixture of water and cow-dung in order to naturally bleach the fabric and remove the starches present in the raw cotton and then it is washed in the running water of a river. After the fabric is laid out in an open field and dried in the sun it becomes ready for the the next step. The dried fabric is treated with a solution of myrobalam (natural seeds from a tree) and buffalo milk. The fabric is dipped in the solution for a couple of hours squeezed and then dried. Myrobalam not only sets the base off-white tone of the fabric it also acts as a natural mordant or fixative for the dyes to adhere to when they are applied later; and the fat in the milk helps to control the spreading of the dye on the cloth.
Once this first mordanting process is complete, the fabric is dried in the open air again and finally becomes ready for the first round of printing. The prepared-fabric meets the woodblocks in the printing workshop where these ~8" x 6" hand-carved blocks are inked and applied in repetition across the entire bolt of fabric. Typically the outline is laid down first and is most often in black or red. Depending on the designers choice of colors, the fabric could be printed in red, blue, yellow, green or black. The color range is limited in SIPA's line of Kalamkari textiles because they only use naturally derived dyes. The red is obtained from algirin or the madder bark, the blue from indigo and the yellow from boiling dried pomegranate rinds. The green is obtained from the pomegranate tree bark or by mixing yellow and blue together, and a naturally obtained black is created from a mixture of iron fillings, jaggery (a coarse dark brown sugar made in India from evaporating the sap of palm trees) and water.
Whichever color is used for the outline, the printed fabric is taken back out to the river to wash out the excess dye and then dried in the sun. The dried
