How a Hand Block Print Is Made

Many years ago, I found myself lucky enough to be traveling through Montpellier, France. It was early May, still a bit chilly, and we spent many hours strolling through sunlit streets in search of the perfect baguette. I remember the colors of the city more than anything: creamy stones and soft blue and green shutters. When I came across a hand block printed floral in nearly the same color palette while searching for new fabrics to design with, the colors and print instantly recalled my fond memories of these few lovely days spent in the south of France.

That print became Terrasse. Our Amelia Blouse, Bastide Skirt, Louise Dress, and Lia Dress are all made with it, and I thought I would share a bit of the process and history of how a hand block print comes to exist.

A very old way of putting flowers on cloth

Block printing is one of the oldest ways of decorating textiles. Dyed cotton cloth has a long history in South Asia, and exactly where and when printing with carved blocks began is still debated. What is well documented is how far Indian printed cotton traveled. Block-printed fragments attributed to the 13th and 14th centuries turned up in Fustat (Old Cairo), Egypt, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds some of them, long before the cloth became fashionable in Europe.

By the seventeenth century, it was fashionable indeed. Hand block printed and painted cottons from India, known as chintz, arrived in Europe in such quantity that wool and silk makers began to worry about their livelihoods. France banned printed cottons in 1686, and the ban lasted until 1759. England passed its own Calico Acts in 1700 and 1721, first restricting imports and then banning the wearing of printed calico. Smuggling became common as people simply wanted the fabric.

The bans ended up pushing European makers to learn to print cotton themselves, which is part of why florals on cotton feel so familiar to us now. Many of the prints we think of as quintessentially European, including the indiennes of Provence actually trace back to Indian originals. Image on left: Early 18th century chintz, from the Coromandel coast of India. Victoria and Albert Museum.

The wood block

Everything begins with a block of wood. Printing blocks are carved by hand, traditionally from a dense, fine-grained hardwood, with the design cut away so that only the raised surface will carry dye. A block holds one element of a pattern, so a design with several colors needs several blocks, one for each color. For our Terrasse print, there are four colors. So, four wooden blocks.

A good block can last for decades and many workshops keep stores of them, an archive of beautiful patterns built up over time and generations.

The printing table

Washed cotton is stretched taut across a long, padded table, sometimes many yards in length. The printer presses the block into a tray of dye, positions it on the cloth, and strikes the back of the block firmly with a fist or palm to transfer the color. Then the block lifts, moves a short distance along the cloth, and the motion repeats, thousands of times across a length of fabric.

For prints with more than one color, each color is printed in its own pass, and the blocks must line up with one another by eye and by small registration marks. It takes years of practice to do this evenly and quickly.

Washed, then laid out in the sun

Once "printed", the fabric is washed to remove excess dye and set the color, then laid out in the sun to dry. This is part of why a hand block printed cotton often feels so soft, and why you may see small shifts in tone from one piece of cloth to the next. The sun, the weather that day, and the hand that pressed each block all leave a trace.

This is our favorite part of the process and find the most beauty in it. A hand blocked print is the polar opposite of a digital print, where every repeat is identical and done by a machine. We think it's lovely that a floral petal being a little bit lighter than the one next to it or a block that’s a hair off means this was crafted slowly by human hands (though if you've watched any Youtube videos of skilled hand block printers, they are anything but slow! It's kind of amazing!) and the variances shows Mother Nature's hand in the creation.

How we work with a print

Terrasse is the first time we've ever worked with a hand block print and we know it won't be our last. Our prints are made and produced in Jaipur, India, which has a long rich history of this craft dating back to the late 16th century. We work with a smaller workshop and love looking through their new catalog of designs and colorways. (Someday we would love to visit them in person and document the process ourselves, what a treat that would be!) When we came across the print that eventually dubbed Terrasse, we changed nary a thing. It felt like a memory in print as it was.

The hand blocked fabric isn't printed until we’ve decided to make something from it which is a bit different from the usual approach, where fabric is produced in large quantities first and garments are decided afterward. We print what we intend to use, and we make every effort to use all of it. This is why you’ll often find one or two small accessories in this print: they’re made from what’s left, so little goes to waste. 

The Terrasse family

Four styles are cut from our Terrasse print:

• The Amelia Blouse, an easy, ruffle-necked blouse with a swingy shape
• The Bastide Skirt, softly gathered to a generous ruffled hem
• The Louise Dress, made for dressing up a little in the countryside
• The Lia Dress, a simple smock dress, named for my mother

Each piece will be slightly different from the next, and that’s how it should be. We hope the Terrasse print reminds you of a place you’ve loved and helps create new memories to look back on fondly.

Explore our full Hand Block Printed Cotton Collection.