Les Indiennes: Environmentally Conscious Fabric

Searching for environmentally conscious fabric, I came across Les Indiennes one of the companies with the most beautiful environmentally friendly fabrics I’ve seen, check out their website.  These cotton fabrics are hand blocked with natural dyes made from roots, rocks, earth, and plants in India.  The technique is called kalamkari- a complex printing method used to produce Les Indiennes fabrics.  This eco-conscious method of creating fabric does not cause pollution nor does it disrupt the traditional lifestyle of the village where it is made.  The process of making the eco-consciously fabric has various steps.  First, the fabric is prepared by softening and bleaching the organic cotton.  Then comes the pretty process of block printing, craftsmen dip hand-carved teak blocks in dyes the derived from the natural sources mentioned above.

The final two steps are color fixing and final touches where the cotton is steamed over a fire of rice chaff to fix the color.  Workers next haul the cloth to a stream and rinse the fabric to remove excess dye. Colors emerge from different streams in different tones.  Finally, after the color is fully saturated, the fabric undergoes another round of softening and color-brightening.  The fabrics are boiled, laid in the sun once more, and dipped in
a natural, color-intensifying solution.  Les Indiennes is located in Hudson, NY.