How Hand Block Printed Fabric Is Made in Jaipur — Inside the Workshop

Most people who buy hand block printed fabric have never watched it being made. The price tag is higher, the texture is softer, the variations are visible — but the actual making stays invisible. We thought it was worth showing.

This is what happens inside our Jaipur workshop, from raw cotton to finished cloth. Eight or nine pairs of hands touch every piece. Each step takes time. Most of it is done sitting cross-legged on a wooden floor, the way it has been done for four hundred years.

Step 1: Carving the wooden block

Everything begins with a block of seasoned teak or sheesham wood. A block carver — in our case, a man named Ramesh who has been carving since he was fourteen — takes a square of wood about four inches across and traces the design onto the surface in pencil. Then, with a set of small chisels, he carves the design in reverse into the wood, so that when the block is pressed onto cloth, the print comes out the right way round.

A simple booti (small floral motif) takes about a day to carve. A complex jaal (lattice pattern repeating across the cloth) can take four or five days. Multi-colour designs need a separate block for each colour — a four-colour print means four blocks, each carved precisely so they line up when pressed in sequence.

Block carvers are the original craftspeople of Jaipur block printing. Without them, none of the rest of the process happens.

Step 2: Preparing the cotton

The fabric arrives at our workshop as raw, GOTS-certified organic cotton — sometimes called greige in the trade. Before printing, it has to be washed thoroughly to remove starches, oils, and finishes from the spinning and weaving process. If we skip this step, the dye won’t bond evenly and the print will come out blotchy.

For some prints — particularly the deep red and rust shades — the cotton is also mordanted, treated with natural compounds (alum, harda) that help the dye fix permanently to the fibre. Then it’s dried, ironed flat, and stretched out on long printing tables made of wood, padded with several layers of jute and cotton.

Step 3: Mixing the dye

For traditional Indian block print, we use natural dyes wherever the colour permits:

• Indigo for blues
• Madder root for warm reds
• Pomegranate rind for yellows
• Iron rust for blacks
• Turmeric for golden yellow

For colours that natural dyes can’t hit — specific tones our customers want — we use GOTS-approved reactive dyes that are tested for skin contact and have no banned heavy metals. Either way, the dye gets mixed with a thickening agent and water, poured into a flat tray called a tray pad, and a piece of fabric stretched on top serves as the surface the block presses into.

Step 4: The printing itself

This is the part most visitors come to see. The printer (in our workshop, mostly women trained in our free programmes) sits or stands beside the long printing table, with the cleaned fabric stretched flat in front of her, the dye tray to her side, and the wooden block in her dominant hand.

Lift, dip, press. Lift, dip, press. Each press is a clear thump of wood meeting fabric meeting padded table. She moves the block down the length of the cloth, registering each impression by eye against the previous one — no rulers, no machines, no jigs. Just hand and eye, hand and eye.

For multi-colour designs, she finishes the first colour completely across the entire length of fabric. Then she lays down the second block, dipped in the second colour, and registers it against the first. Then the third. Then the fourth, if there is one.

A printer working a single-colour design can print roughly twenty metres of fabric a day. Four-colour designs slow down to perhaps five or six metres a day. There’s no shortcut. The variations in pressure, in dye saturation, in registration are what tell you the cloth was made by a person and not stamped by a machine. We don’t edit those out. They’re the signature.

Step 5: Dabu — the mud resist (when used)

Some of our most distinctive prints — indigo dabu, in particular — use a technique called dabu, which is a mud-resist process. The areas of cloth that should stay white are coated with a paste made from clay, gum arabic, and lime. The fabric is then dipped in indigo dye. The dye colours everything except the mud-coated areas.

After dyeing, the mud is washed off, revealing white pattern against the indigo background. It’s a slow, multi-stage process — each round of mud and dye takes a full day, and complex dabu prints can require three or four rounds. The result is a depth of colour and pattern that no other technique replicates.

Step 6: Washing and drying

Once printing is complete, the fabric is washed thoroughly to remove excess pigment and any residual mordant or finish. Traditionally this is done in clear running water; in our workshop we use a controlled water system that captures and treats the wastewater, so we’re not pushing dye effluent into anyone else’s soil.

Then the fabric goes out to dry. We use direct sun whenever the weather permits — the sun fixes some of the natural dyes through gentle photo-oxidation and gives the cotton a softness that machine drying can’t. On overcast days, we hang it under cover.

Step 7: Finishing and stitching

From the drying yard, the fabric goes to our finishing room. Edges are checked, hems are stitched, sets are matched. For products like cushion covers and bed sheets, the fabric is cut and sewn here too. The same women who train new printers also train new tailors — most of our finishing team learned their craft inside the workshop.

Then, the finished piece is folded, packed, and shipped — directly from our Jaipur workshop to homes, designer studios, and brands across five continents. No middlemen. Every piece carries the small variations of having been touched by eight or nine pairs of human hands.

Why it costs more (and lasts longer)

A factory-printed bedsheet in pure cotton can be made in a few hours, end to end, using a rotary print machine. A hand block printed bedsheet of the same size takes us four to six days of cumulative human time. The cotton is more expensive (organic, GOTS-certified). The dyes are more expensive (natural where possible, GOTS-approved chemistry where not). The labour is more expensive (skilled, paid fairly).

What you get back is a piece of cloth that softens with every wash, that shows the marks of the people who made it, and that doesn’t fade or pill the way fast-fashion textiles do. We have customers who have used our bed linen for fifteen years.

Where to start

If you’d like to feel the difference yourself, the easiest entry points are our bed linen, cushion covers, or our hand block printed fabric by the yard. Designer labels and global brands buy from us in wholesale; retail customers buy single pieces. Same workshop, same artisans, same eight pairs of hands. Direct from Jaipur, ships worldwide.