Once Upon A Tea Time

Priya at Once Upon a Tea Time recently spot-lighted our wood block stamps on her blog. For the less craftily-inlined, wood block stamps are created when artisans hand carve into high quality teak blocks. Although they're part of cultural traditions all over the world, currently the majority of wood block stamps hail from India. Artisans then use these stamps to print beautiful and elaborate patterns.

The real trick is that they must create a separate stamp for each color used in a design. Master printers estimate that one block will last for 1,500 meters of fabric, and once it runs out the design is often retired.

While in India, we learned a few ways to tell if fabric is authentically block-printed. So remember these out the next time you're looking at ethnic textiles:

• Designs do not "line up" every single time - on the blue ginko fabric above, you can see how the yellow color occasionally bleeds outside the lines of its flower petals. That's not a flaw - that's just the sign that an artisan didn't line up the stamps perfectly.
  
• With a little practice, you should be able to see the "block" and how the print repeats. Blocks are rarely larger than a foot square, for ease of use.