Block Printing, Sanganeri saris

Block printed saris have been created throughout India over the past few centuries, but the Western region has remained the primary area of production. The most important centres of block printing are Sanganer, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Jetpur, Rajkot, Porbandar and Bhavnagar in Gujarat.

The village of Sanganer near Jaipur has been a major centre for very fine block-cutting and printing, and has produced fine muslin saris printed on both sides of the fabric. This elaborate work needs expertly cut mirror images blocks to print the usually asymmetrical Mughal style designs. Although Sanganer is well known for producing fine block printed textiles on off white or pastel backgrounds, today a wide range of textiles are produced with both dark and pale grounds.

A strong Mughal aesthetic dominates the region's printed sari designs. Borders and end pieces consist of repeated bands of undulated twines (bel) of various sizes. Field are often covered with a repeat design varying from small simple dots or geometric shape to large complex buta and kalga.

Cloth printing blocks are usually made of 'teak' or 'seesum'. These dyes are printed on a textile by means of a relief covered block( a different block for each color). In India, the blocks are usually 23-30 cm (9-12") square in size.

Temple Saris

A more traditional variation of the Kornad Sari is called Temple sari. Technically, a temple sari is any sari woven for and donated to a temple deity in any part of South Asia. Originally it had to be perfectly executed, although it has always reflected what the donor could afford. Today however all the wide bordered Kornad Saris have become popularly known as temple saris. One type of traditiona Kornard sari is the interlocked weft woven sari, that has its two borders and fields of equal width. The borders are in the usual unembellished style but in the type most often called a temple sari, the entire length of narrow field is covered with fine quality supplementary weft zari patterning woven as a series of weft wise rows which includes such motifs as elephant, peacocks, double headed eagles and foliate floral vines. The motifs are typical of Tamil Nadu south Andhra Pradesh graphic and two dimensional representations are quite unlike the more three dimensional appearance of the northern Indian Patterning typical of Benaras

Tangail saris

Tangail Sarees

Although Jamdanis were traditionally woven by Muslims, Hindu weavers who moved from Tangail during partition helped developoing India's modern Jamdani industry. They were probably originally trained in the pre partition government school that was founded at Tangail in 1930s in an effort to revive the then disapperaring craft of Jamdani weaving. Significantly West Bengal Jamdanis are often called Tangail Jamdani and they typically have many small buti woven throughout the field often diagonally. They are now woven in many areas of West Bengal in such villages as Dhatrigram, Samudragarls, Saithia, Phulia and Shantipur. Those from Shantipur have black or dark blue bodies with brightr buti. Today the Tangail Jamdanis have developed a style of its own with a distinctly Modernist Hindu Aesthetic and it is now acquiring the vibrant colours of southern India and bold animal designs of Andhra Pradesh. Many are also made in silk instead of cotton because silk is easier and faster to weave and weavers are usually paid more for weaving silk fabric than cotton.

Kashmir Embroidery

The beautiful valley of Kashmir is justly famed for its textiles, above all the Kashmir shawl. The manufacture of embroidered shawls was started by an Armenian named Khwaja Yusuf, who introduced the concept of amli, the needlework shawls.

The classical Kashmiri shawl was made of Pashmina wool whose main source was the fleece of a central Asian species of mountain goat. Now only a fraction of these shawls are woven out of Pashmina wool, a mjority of them are made out of a yarn called ruffal which is spun out of Merino wool.

The shawl ground cloth was prepared by being rubbed with a piece of polished agate or or cornelian on the flat surface of a plank until it was prerfectly smooth. The pattern to be embroidered was then made on the the cloth with coloured power or charcoal and then embroidered with a satin or stem stitch, each stitch made to lie as flat as possible by picking up warp threads.

Whilst shwals are embroidered with a needle, much of the embroidery done in Kashmir valley is ari work. As with the weaving, embroidery is a male profession. The ari work is used to decorate clothing, wall hanging rugs, curtain covers and whole rolls of furnishing fabrics, with varying complexity of designs.

Maps of Srinagar and human figures are a very popular motif.