The art of block printing

The cotton fabric for each Daydress product is hand block printed in Jaipur by our team of skilled printers

Beauty and The Block

This short film offers a glimpse into our magical world of block-printing. As a method of putting pattern onto cloth or paper, it’s hard to conceive of a more peaceful or meditative way to produce what is the absolute foundation for all our dresses. As we learn more about what’s possible within this form, we can experiment with colour, shape and scale, being ever more creative. This is where the oldest form of printing can be so exciting and still produce such surprisingly modern results.

The plain cotton fabrics are stretched and pinned like a blank canvas onto 6m long tables. The colours are mixed by hand before being poured into wooden trays lined with mesh and cotton fabric (like an ink-pad) Hand-carved wooden blocks are pressed into the colour and then applied to the fabric with a solid ‘whack’ of the block printer’s hand - the noise of these thumps are the soundtrack to every block printing studio in Jaipur!

Each colour in a design has its own block which should line up perfectly with the others to build up the pattern.A good block printer is a master of alignment!

Some of our most complicated designs have up to 14 blocks, but we also have a few that have only one or two, and these are just as charming, if not more so!

Block printing is a centuries-old craft and still continues in many workshops across India. It might be the simplest and slowest of all textile-printing methods but it yields some of the most beautiful results.While this method of pattern making has its inherent limitations, we loveto push the boundaries of what is achievable through block printing, often playing with scale and types of pattern placement.