Spend a few days in Jaipur and you’ll understand why we came home wanting to start a bag business. Everyone and everything seems to be dripping in colour and beautiful prints. For two women who were supposedly there to buy marquees, it was quite distracting.
But watching those prints being made? That’s where we got properly hooked.
What actually is hand block printing?
Hand block printing is a way of printing patterns onto fabric using carved wooden blocks. The maker applies colour to the block, carefully positions it on the cotton and presses it down. Then repeats. Again and again, lining up the pattern as they go.
Prints with several colours can involve separate blocks for each colour, each one carefully aligned with the last.
We had a go ourselves. Let’s just say we developed an immediate appreciation for the people who do this properly.
The hands behind the prints
Watching our makers in Jaipur, you realise just how much time, care and precision goes into a piece of fabric.
The steady hands alone deserve a mention. Keeping a pattern lined up across metres of cotton, by eye and by hand, is quite something. We struggle to put a phone screen protector on straight.
There’s skill in every placement of the block, along with the patience and passion that come from knowing your craft.
When you see the finished fabric in a bag, you’re seeing hours of somebody’s work.
Why the little differences belong
Because the fabric is printed by hand, you’ll sometimes see slight differences in the placement of a pattern or the depth of a colour. The printing itself is done with wooden blocks, rather than a machine producing an identical repeat.
Those small variations are part of the art. They’re the traces of the hands that made it.
It’s one of the things we fell in love with in the first place.
From choosing fabrics to choosing every colour
When Pink City began, we bought fabrics that were already available from our makers. We still choose some that way, because certain prints sell out and you lot keep asking us to bring them back. We’re listening.
But over the past 18 months, we’ve become much more involved in creating what comes next.
We now choose prints and colour combinations, work through Pantone colour charts and approve samples ourselves. There is a surprising amount of discussion involved in finding exactly the right pink.
Every sample gives us something to consider: how the colours work together, how the print looks on a bag and whether it’s something we’d be excited to carry ourselves.
That’s how our Puffer Stripe collection came together — our choices, brought to life through our makers’ skill.
From that first fabric shop in Jaipur to choosing the details of our own collections, we’ve learnt a lot. And we still get ridiculously excited when the samples arrive.
Explore our Puffer Stripe collection to see where all those colour discussions ended up.
