Blocks away!

History of Print part 1

This blog was supposed to be about the history of print, but really, where would I start...

With SS12 production delivery almost upon us, and Resort 2012 to start it would be safer for the future of the business if this topic was broken down into much smaller, digestible sections.

And so I bring you part 1, probably the most relevant form of printing at Dunn towers, extremely important and close to our hearts, the ancient and traditional art of wooden block printing…….

Woodblock printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper. As a method of printing on cloth, the earliest surviving examples from China date to before 220, and from Egypt to the 4th century.

The blocks themselves look beautiful enough to have on any shelf, and the effects they create on the fabrics are really stunning and completely bring them to life.
Here at Juliet Dunn we often use blocks in multiple colours and on various fabrics. It is always a pleasure to visit workrooms in India and watch the skillful and amazingly quick and accurate way that the blocks are stamped onto the fabrics. These pictures really cannjust how ennough how talented and skilled everyone in this process really is! Each colour in the print requires a separate block which are all repeatedly stamped by hand to match perfectly and build up the design seamlessly.

The wood block itself is carefully prepared as a relief matrix, which means the areas to show blacked are cut away with a knife, chisel, or sandpaper leaving the characters or image to show in 'black' at the original surface level. The block was cut along the grain of the wood. It is only necessary to ink the block and bring it into firm and even contact with the paper or cloth to achieve an acceptable print. The content would of course print "in reverse" or mirror-image, a further complication when text was involved. For colour printing, multiple blocks are used, each for one colour, although overprinting two colours may produce further colours on the print.