Selvedge Magazine’s Post

Join Polly Leonard on the Selvedge Textile Tour of India 12 February-25 March 2025 The tour begins in New Delhi on Wednesday, 12 February 2025 & ends in New Delhi on Tuesday, 25 March 2025. An introduction to some of the people and places we will visit from the Selvedge archive. Jaipur Article: Blue Sky Thinking Nila House, Jaipur In the heart of the Pink City there is a house named in honour of blue. Nila House (nila meaning blue in Hindi) refers to India’s oldest natural dye, indigo. Founded in 2019 by Carole Bamford (perhaps best known as the founder of Daylesford Organics), Nila is part of the Lady Bamford Foundation - a charitable initiative of JCB (more often associated with yellow) - which works with communities around Jaipur and Udaipur, to encourage sustainable production and enhance business efficiency in artisan workshops, with a particular focus on natural dyes and handloom textiles. Nila stemmed from Bamford’s passion for Indian textiles, combined with the desire to make a positive environmental commitment in the country that she fell in love with forty years ago, and where today, waste water from the synthetic dying process has contaminated many rivers. A sustainable crop, indigo was once grown widely across India, producing shades of blue ranging from from inky-almost-black to summersky-blue. For the dyers, it is safe to handle, which is just as well as the process can be long. It involves fermenting the leaves of indigo plants, but the fabric does not turn blue in the vat. Exposure to oxygen is required. A drying piece of dyed fabric will slowly turn from yellow to green, to a deep dark blue. The length of time the fabric spends submerged does not dictate the richness of the colour, so the fermenting, dying and drying needs great skill. Too much fermentation, or not enough, or the wrong level of heat can destroy a whole batch of dye. (...)Laura Gray - Images: Lukasz Augusciak and Sine Bhola Read the entire article on Selvedge issue 93, Rethink. https://lnkd.in/emt-hYvb

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