Our Craft
The making of an impression.
A short walk through a long process.
Block printing looks simple. A piece of carved wood, a tray of dye, a length of cotton, a pair of hands. There are eight steps from blank cloth to finished piece, and most of them are slow.
What follows is a walk through how a Sutracraft piece is actually made. Not the romantic version. The real version. Carved wood, mixed dye, stretched cloth, pressed by hand, dried in the sun, washed, pressed, finished.
If you've never seen block printing done, this is the page that will make sense of why a piece costs what it costs and why slight variation between pieces is part of what makes it worth buying.
1. Block carving.
Every block printed pattern starts with a piece of teak or sheesham wood, hand-carved by a block maker. The carver works from a paper drawing, transferring the design to the wood with a tracing technique that hasn't changed. Then the negative space is chiselled out — what's left raised on the surface of the block is what will print on the cloth.
A single block can take a block carver anywhere from one day to two weeks, depending on the complexity of the motif. The blocks we use most often were carved years or even decades ago. A good teak block, used carefully, can last for thirty to forty years of printing.
2. Dye preparation.
Most of our pieces use one of two dye types: pigment dyes (water-based, for everyday cotton printing) and natural dyes (indigo, madder root, pomegranate) for our older or more labour-intensive pieces.
Indigo is the slowest to prepare. It ferments in clay vats over five days, using a starter culture the workshop has kept alive for decades. Madder is boiled from root for several hours and strained. Pigment dyes are mixed each morning before printing.
The dye sets the cloth. Get it wrong and the print fades in the first wash. Get it right and the colour holds for the life of the cotton.
3. Setting up the cloth.
Cotton arrives at the workshop as a bolt — usually 110 cm wide, 50 to 100 metres long. Before printing, it's pre-washed once to remove starch and stabilise the weave, then air-dried. The cloth is then laid flat on a long printing table padded with several layers of cotton wadding underneath.
Registration marks are drawn lightly on the cloth at regular intervals. These guide the printer to keep the motif spacing even across metres of fabric. Get the registration wrong and the pattern wanders.
4. The first press.
A karigar dips the block in the dye tray, lifts it cleanly, and presses it against the cloth with a single firm motion. Then lifts the block, moves a precise distance, and presses again. The whole craft is in this repetition.
The press has to be exact. Too soft and the dye doesn't transfer. Too hard and the dye spreads beyond the carved edges. A skilled karigar can make eight to twelve presses per minute, all the same depth, all the same length of contact. Across a king-size bedsheet, that's several thousand presses.
Slight variation between presses is unavoidable, and it's the visible difference between a hand-printed cloth and a machine-printed one. Each impression carries a faint shadow where the block lifted, a slight pressure variation, a barely perceptible double press where two blocks met. These are not flaws. They are the visible evidence of a hand at work.
5. Drying.
After printing, the cloth is hung in the sun to dry. Drying takes one to three days depending on the weather, the dye, and the time of year. March drying (warm, dry, low humidity) is fastest. July drying (monsoon) is mostly avoided.
Sun drying matters. The UV in direct sunlight helps set the dye and brightens the colours. It is one of the reasons the workshop has been in this part of Rajasthan — the climate, especially the dry months, is suited to the work.
6. Washing.
Once the cloth is dry, it's washed — sometimes once, sometimes two or three times depending on the dye. The first wash removes any unfixed dye and any residue from the printing process. For indigo, the first wash is when the colour stabilises into its final tone.
By the time you receive a Sutracraft piece, it has already been washed at least once at the workshop. It will continue to soften with every wash you do at home.
7. Finishing.
Hemming, edge-finishing, button sewing, label stitching — all done by hand or by foot-pedal sewing machine in the workshop. None of these decisions is dramatic. All of them show in the cloth a year later.
8. Quality and packing.
Every piece is inspected before it leaves the workshop — for stitching faults, dye irregularity beyond what we accept as hand-print variation, weave defects in the cotton. Pieces that don't pass are reprinted or repaired. Then the piece is folded into a block-printed cotton drawstring bag, placed in a kraft outer box, and sealed with paper tape. No plastic, anywhere.
Two schools, two traditions.
Block printing in Rajasthan is not a single tradition. There are two main schools, both within an hour of Jaipur, and they make different cloth.
Sanganer. Sanganeri prints are typically fine, dense, layered — pale colours, often white or cream backgrounds, intricate motifs in soft tones. Most of our bedding comes from Sanganer. The water in the area is alkaline, which suits the dye-setting process for fine printing.
Bagru. Bagru is smaller, more rural, and uses bolder colours — deep indigos, strong madder reds, and the distinctive Bagru technique called "dabu" or mud-resist. In dabu printing, a paste of clay, gum, and chalk is painted onto the cloth in a pattern, then the cloth is dyed. The paste resists the dye, leaving the original cotton showing where the paste was. Most of our two-tone and multi-colour pieces come from Bagru.
What this means for what you buy.
Eight steps. Two to three weeks of work for a single piece. A handful of human hands. A workshop in Jaipur or a village in Bagru. Wooden blocks carved decades ago by craftsmen who no longer carve.
When you receive a Sutracraft piece, you are not receiving a product made for you specifically. You are receiving something made by people who do this work every day, into which you happen to walk in the moment of buying.
Slight variation. Slight imperfection. Soft on first night. Softer on the hundredth. That's the craft.