Mud Resist Print

Got this article from Brass Tacks. Brass Tacks, from the expression getting down to brass tacks, is a company that focusses on the most important aspects of a garment: fabric, fit, and tailoring quality.  As an effort to find new markets for traditional textile crafts and hand woven fabric, the design team at Brass Tacks works to re-articulate these fabrics in the form of contemporary styles with an urban context. I am selling a couple of bags made  from cotton fabric with these prints. Click here to go to the original article. One technique of block printing used often in almost every Brass Tacks collection is the mud-resist ( or “dabu”) block printing of Rajasthan. This technique allows for patterns to appear as translucent- showing off another pattern printed below it. Also in this method, several colours can be used on a fabric for various parts of a print.

In order to make the fabric absorb dyes, the fabric is first dipped into a mordant. In natural dyeing units, a natural mordant made from the seeds of the Chebulic myrobalan tree are used. After drying the fabric, the first stage of printing is done. Wooden blocks, carved by hand, are dipped into dyes and then printed on the fabric. The first stage of printing is sometimes done with chemical dyes, but originally done with natural dyes. To understand this process, let’s say the print was done in red with alizarine.

The second stage is printing a “dabu” resist onto the block. This resist is a mixture of river bed clay, slaked lime, tree gum and wheat powder. The resist covers the previously printed block so that when the entire fabric is dipped into another dye (for example Indigo) everything except the block gets coloured. Finally when the fabric is dried and washed, the pattern revealed is an indigo dyed fabric with prints in red.

More complication printing can be done with dyes mixed into the “dabu” mixture and printed on top of an existing print. The effect of this is a semi- translucent print through which you can see the underlying print.

Most printing done by hand does not permeate into the fabric fibres in the way that dyeing fabric does. For this reason, even if the hand block printing is done on mill made fabric and machine washed, the fabric should always be dried in the shade to avoid the sun’s bleaching effect.