Melting and chasing blocks

Already 40' most days, and little better in the night...and for the last few days we have had a hot and dusty wind just to top it off!

For ages we have been threatening to go to the block carvers to put orders in and it just happened to be the hottest and windiest day when we had time to go...by the time we got home I was a little weird in the head, couldn't drink enough water to make up for what was sweating out...all good again now.

 We had a mammoth session with the carvers - on the right is young Renu Khan -he has officially taken the business over from his Papa and is very serious about the work, the workshop is now full of 4 or 5 other young gentleman all carvers and it was so great to see the care and concern they approached our order.
We had a few blocks for ourselves and were also commissioning block for a few different clients... so much to work through.
We learnt a lot about what to look for in a good block design from the point of view of easy lining up of the various layers in the print.

 Love the little name labels the different carvers have made for themselves and there amongst them was a bit of a slip up...one of our blocks "I am the secret ingredient x" we used on cooking aprons...you can read it correctly which means when printed it would be reversed- ooops

 Just around the corner is our indigo guy and the neighbourhood has other families working with natural iron black and mud resist printing for indigo dyeing. All exciting stuff.
Look at this vat- fermenting molasses and horse shoe iron- you will be glad we don't have small-o-rama on blogs - let me tell you

 The iron guy has some gorgeous designs to choose from...

 Cloth drying with mud resist printed on waiting to go to the indigo guy....

 A lovely airy roof top workshop, catching any breezes passing....

 We had such fun trying to catch the magic of iron black.
It all comes about through a combination of the cloth soaked in a mordant [making it a bit yellowish] and then the iron oxidizing once it is printed onto the fabric.

 It was a lot of fun [and about another 20 pictures trying to get an image of the iron before it oxidised to black]

This is Rambabu-ji our indigo guy and his son Kuldeep. Lovely people, serious about their work, Kuldeep is proudly following in his father's footsteps- great to see them work together.

ohh a good day- so exciting meeting with artisans passionate about their craft :)