Ajrak: two colours, sixteen steps

Ajrak is printed in Sindh the way it has been printed for centuries: with carved wooden blocks, in a sequence of resists, dyes and washes that runs to sixteen steps and takes the better part of three weeks. Almost none of that time is printing.

The cloth is prepared before it is touched

Cotton arrives with the mill's finish still on it. It is washed, beaten and steeped so that it will take dye evenly — a step that decides everything after it, and one a printed imitation skips entirely.

Resist first, colour second

The pattern is not painted on. A lime-and-gum resist is printed where the cloth is to stay white, and a second resist where it is to stay pale. Only then does the whole length go into indigo, and later into madder. The design appears by being protected from colour rather than given it.

This is why an ajrak reads the same on both faces. The dye goes through the cloth, not onto it.

Indigo, then madder

Indigo is a vat dye: the cloth comes out green and turns blue in the air, in front of you. Madder is boiled, and takes its red from the root. The two colours cannot be laid in the other order, which is the reason every true ajrak sits in the same family of blue and rust — and the reason a black ajrak, like the one on our rail, is a deliberate departure rather than a default.

Washed twice before it is cut

Between and after the dye baths the cloth is washed in running water and dried in the sun. We wash ours twice more before it reaches the cutting table, so the colour that arrives with you is the colour it will keep. Hand wash it cold for its first three washes and it will go on softening for years.

What to look for

Hold a hem up to the light and follow the border. You will find the point where one block ended and the next was set down — a half-millimetre step, registered by eye. That step is how you tell a block print from a photograph of one.