A Visit to an Indigo Fabric Dying Studio in Hungary

This fabric is called Kékfestö in Hungarian, a word that roughly translates as blue-dyed or blue-dying. Producing these fabrics is a cottage industry in Hungary, which dates back several centuries. The dye is indigo; the cloth is cotton; and the long, arduous process results in a type of batik fabric. The photo above shows a small fold of each of the fabrics I bought at the blue-dyed studio shown below. (As always, please click on the photos if you'd like to see more detail.)

When in Hungary in October, 2016, my quilting/travel friend (Lunnette) and I, as guests of my Hungarian bead sister, Anna Fehér, had the very exciting experience of visiting the hand-dying studio of Miklós Kovács in the little village of Tiszakécske, SE of Budapest. The studio, located behind his home, includes two rooms, one for printing the raw cloth with a wax resist, and the second for dying the printed cloth with indigo. In front of the building, you can see rods above the deck, which are used for hanging the fabric to dry after it is dyed, and a wagon loaded with printed cloth ready to be dyed.

Meet Mr. Miklós Kovács, now in his 80s! Charming and animated, he is explaining his traditional, hand-dying process to Anna. Blue-dying has been the Kovács family's livelihood since 1878, each new generation being trained by the previous Master. It is strictly a family affair. Miklós, his wife, Margit, and their two daughters, Gabriella and Mária, currently produce about 10,000 meters of Kékfestö (blue-dyed) fabric every year. When Mr. and Mrs. Kovács retire, the business will pass to their daughters. This post shows how they turn plain white cloth into beautiful fabrics with white motifs on an indigo background.

First, they need thousands of meters of fine-quality, tightly-woven, raw cotton cloth, which is rinsed to remove impurities, then carefully ironed and rolled onto wooden rods which fit onto the printing machine. This pile of untreated cotton cloth, manufactured in Turkey, is the remainder of a big shipment purchased at the start of the year.

Next they need a print block or plate. These are made with wire pins of various diameters, which are pounded into blocks of dense wood. Here you see the many plate choices available in the Kovács studio, each yielding a different motif on the fabric. The length of each print block is the same as the width of the fabric; the width is the width of the pattern repeat, generally designed to be about 4.5 inches..

This is the end of one of the print blocks, showing how the design is formed by setting metal pins of different diameters into the wooden block.

And here is the fabric (after dying it with indigo, and removing the wax resist), which was printed with the block in the photo above it. Naturally, a half-meter of this one came home with me!

This is the machine which is used to print the motif on the raw cotton cloth with a wax resist. Mr. Kovács keeps his printing machine, built in Germany 120 years ago, in good running condition with machinist skills he learned alongside his father.

You can see the sprocket, lower right, which is adjusted to advance the fabric through the machine in increments exactly the length of the pattern repeat. For most motifs, the fabric advances 4 to 5 inches after each time the print block is applied to the fabric, thus revealing the next short stretch of un-printed cloth.

Here you can see many meters of raw cotton cloth, suspended on a metal rod at the back of the printing press. There is a leader of waste cloth stitched to the end of the roll which has been fed through the rollers of the machine to get the process started.

At the front of the printing machine, a worker swipes a tray with wax resist, which is tinted green so that it will be visible on the printed cloth. The printing block touches down on the waxed tray, picks up a coating of was, and then presses firmly against the fabric.

After being imprinted with wax resist, the fabric is wound up and down through a drying rack located behind the printing machine.

When it is dry, the printed fabric is folded and stacked until there is a sufficient quantity to begin the dying process. You can see that some of the raw cloth in this pile was pre-dyed pink, blue, or beige. After over-dying with indigo and removing the resist, the motif on these pieces will be pink, blue or beige with an indigo background, rather than the much more common white motif with an indigo background.

This close-up photo shows how the fabric looks after the wax resist (tinted green so that is shows on white cloth) is dry. This is the motif being printed while we were there. Liking the design a lot, I was very pleased to find finished fabric in this pattern available to purchase.

And this is how the cloth will look after it is dyed with indigo, the wax resist removed, and the fabric washed and ironed. As you might have already guessed, a half-meter of this one came home with me!

As we watch the cloth passing slowly through the rollers of the printing machine, Lunnette holds a scrap of dyed fabric which was tied to the machine, indicating the motif currently being printed.

At last, we get to the dye pot!  Here on the burner, a concentrated indigo dye formula is being readied to pour into the dye vat.

Don't forget to wear those heavy rubber gloves, or the skin on your hands will be tinged with blue for a long time.

Mr. Kovács gave a long, animated talk (all in Hungarian, which I only slightly comprehend) about the whole process of blue dying. You've already seen how the cloth is printed with wax resist. The next step is to dye the background.

The cloth is dyed in a vat with the indigo dye-bath at 85 degrees C., then washed to remove the wax and rinsed to remove the excess dye. After rinsing, the cloth is looped over racks to dry outdoors, which completes the dying process. Sadly, he did no dying while we were there, so I don't have pictures or first-hand experience with precisely how it is done to share with you.

However the fabric is not yet ready to use. It must be starched, dried, and then pressed using both steam and steel rollers with heavy pressure, in order to create the traditionally desirable shiny finish on the cloth. Finally, the fabric is folded onto bolts for distribution to shops and end-users.

We learned how they hand-print motifs on cloth using a template, such that after dying, the fabric can be cut out and hemmed as a finished table cloth. You can see the templates hanging on the wall. The desired template is placed over the fabric, and a pencil used to mark the registration points for lining up the printing block. Fabrics which have already been printed are stacked in front of the templates. After being dyed, this fabric will be made into table cloths and runners of various sizes.

This is a section of cloth which as been marked with a template, and hand-stamped with wax resist. After dying with indigo and removing the wax, it will be made into a rectangular table cloth with a lovely double border all the way around.

Mrs. Kovács demonstrates for us how she lines up the print block with the penciled registration marks, and then lowers it onto the fabric. With the stamp resting on the cloth, she lightly pounds it with her fist to set the wax into the fabric. It was obvious to us that carefully making each wax impression all the way around the cloth takes a lot of time and concentration. As you an see below, the results of her hand-printing are stunning!.

Here is an example of a hand-stamped, indigo-dyed fabric made into a round table cloth. Obviously, it came home with me, and is perfect for my kitchen table!  This fabric is quite wide, and takes a great deal of space and time to print. Yet, the prices were very reasonable!

After spending several hours in the studio, we were invited to the house for a shopping bonanza! Fortunately, hoping ahead of time that we would be visiting a Kékfestö studio when we got to Hungary, we had saved our allowances for some months, and were prepared to shop for future quilting and sewing projects. The prices, ranging $10 to $15 per meter depending on the width, seemed very reasonable considering the quality of the fabric, and the extreme amount of work that goes into producing it.

In addition to yardage, both of us bought a table cloth and an apron. Mine is shown above.

What a totally delightful experience we had! Mr. and Mrs. Kovács are as friendly and nice as can be!  If you ever get to Hungary, you can find their fabrics and finished products in the picturesque town of Szentendre, just a short drive or train ride north of Budapest on the Danube River. Here is a website link.

To end our visit at the Kovács studio, here is a tribute photo of the elder Mr. Kovács, who during his boyhood in the 1920's was immersed in the world of his family's blue-dying business, and who continued producing Kékfestö indigo-dyed fabrics for his entire life, while training his own son to continue the trade.

Like his father, the younger Mr. Kovács has trained his daughters to continue when he retires, although I'm sure he has many more years to go, probably well into his 90s..

My last two photos in this post are a little surprise for you. Before falling in love with beading and quilting, my main passion was Hungarian folk dancing. I danced in a performance group for 10 years (and later became one of the group's choreographers), performing at many events in the Seattle area, including Bumbershoot and the Folklife Festival. We also performed at the World's Fair when it was in Vancouver, British Columbia. I and several of the other dancers in the group made most of our costumes using Hungarian fabrics and original costumes as patterns.

It was folk music and dance that first called my heart and soul into Hungary, where I have since spent a cumulative total of well over a year of my life, spaced over 14 different visits so far.

So, here you go. This is me, wearing a costume I made with Kékfestö fabric for performing the dances of the Szatmár region, located in northeastern Hungary. This photo was taken in September, 1986 at the World's Fair in Vancouver, Canada, where we performed on two separate occasions.

And this is me on stage at a festival in Redmond, WA, happy as can be, Hungarian folk music, song and dance, filling me with joy!  Michael Kappleman and I are the second couple from the left.

So you see...  Kékfestö and I go back a long way. Next, I'll be quilting with it!

*****
My apologies to Hungarians for not using the correct accent mark for the last letter of the Hungarian word Kékfestö. I spent 4 hours trying to do it, but could not get Blogger to accept anything I tried.

Huge Challenge: Making a Whole from the Parts

In the previous posts, you've seen the individual blocks I've been making, 61 of them, for my Travel Diary 2014 quilt. Each block is quilted, bound, and embellished... each a mini-quilt. The difficult challenge was how to put them all together into a whole piece.

This is one of the 61 blocks.

My original thought was to stitch them together into a wall hanging, something like the arrangement below:

No way! As I played with the arrangement, it was obvious that the results were "muddy," confusing, and "busy" from close up... and boring from a distance.

So then, I spaced them apart, like in a photo album, not touching, something like this:

Nope. That didn't work either... still too busy, muddy, and boring from a distance. Akkk, what to do???? Sleep on it!

Next morning, the solution came to me upon waking! Sew them together in clusters, and mount the clusters on a back-quilt!

To see how the idea would work, I grouped the blocks on a piece of fabric from my stash, each cluster representing a whole (or segment of a) trip. This is how it looked:

The idea of clustering worked! Yay! Instead of 61 different things to view, there were now only a dozen or so. And from a distance, the shapes of the clusters against the pathway of background color made an interesting pattern.

What color would the back-quilt be, and how would the clusters be attached, I wondered? After stitching the clusters together, I took them to the quilt shops in Anacortes to find the a fabric for the back-quilt.  It had to be a read-as-solid print, one that wouldn't distract from the clusters, in a color  that contrasted in value with the over-all value of the clusters. I soon found that either too much or too little value contrast was not good. Two green prints and a light coral print came home with me as possibilities.

That evening, after trying all three of them, I decided to go with one of the green prints. The clusters seemed to "pop" nicely on it!

However, the next morning, when I viewed it in daylight, the green seemed just too cool. My travels were warm (at heart) and wonderful...  I wanted the quilt to have visual warmth. Back to the drawing board. I made a "help!" call to Lunnette, my quilting friend and travel companion on one of the trips, who came over and agreed that the green was good... except for the important consideration of "warmth." While trying various possible fabrics, she happened to mention that red is sometimes considered a neutral color, which made me look at the red/rose fabrics in my stash with a different eye. When we put the clusters on a piece of medium-rose batik, we both knew instantly we had found the back-quilt fabric!!! Whooo-hooo!

Next was the matter of how to construct the back-quilt and how to attach the clusters. I made all the mini-decisions on an "as needed" basis. Here they are in order:

1. quilt the names of the people I spent time with on these travels on the back-quilt (picture shows one quilted line, and two lines written in chalk to be quilted)
   
   
2. use the same color thread as the fabric to quilt the names, so they are there, but do not distract the viewer from the clusters of blocks
3. make the edges of the back-quilt irregular
4. bind the back-quilt edges, and then whip stitch the binding with pearl cotton, the same as the individual blocks
   
5. sew the clusters onto the back-quilt on the top edge only, allowing the cluster to be lifted to see the backs of the blocks (all different fabrics, carefully chosen for the subject of each block), and giving a place to sew a label identifying the location, people, etc. in the photos of that cluster
6. use a double row of hand-stitching along the top of each cluster to support the weight
7. make a small identifying label for each cluster
   
8. sew a small, and very personal, embellishment on the back of each cluster, something I know is there but that most people won't see (or know the meaning of if they did see it)

And here is the finished quilt. It's 37" wide by 43" tall. Even if you click-to-enlarge, this picture does not do the quilt justice... So, if you'd like to really SEE it, come to the La Conner Quilt & Textile Museum during April (April 1 - May 3), when it and 29 other of my beaded objects and quilts will be exhibited!

What did I learned making this quilt? Whew... probably more than you'd want to read... The most important thing was a reinforcement of the "just do it" approach to original art, an approach that works so well for me with my bead embroidery. Not stressing over all the decisions, not needing to have all the answers in hand before starting, is a hugely enabling gift to the creative process!

Hands - BJP for August Finished

What would I do without my hands? That's a hideous thought, because all day, every day I use my hands... to bead, to stitch, to knit, to quilt, to type, to garden, to cook, to pet the cat. This year's BJP pieces are all about blessings in my life, and my hands vie with my vision for a spot at the top of the list.

First I made a reduced-size copy of my hand. I think it's about 50 %, but don't recall for sure. I cut out the hand, traced around it on my fabric for the basic hand shape, and drew in the lines by looking at my hand.

Looking through my brighter, warmer colored stash of batiks, I was drawn to a light-yellow fabric with rings of pink, lavender and aqua. It seemed right, although I didn't know at the time why.  It definitely influenced my color choices for the beads, and also the patterns I beaded on the hand.

Here's the finished piece, Hands (2.5 x 3.5 inches, standard ATC size). I called the previous pieces in this series ATCs (Artist Trading Cards), but really they are not, because I do not intend to trade them. They are my visual journaling pieces for 2012, one per month, each one about a life-blessing that seems important to me that month.

Back to my hands. I work improvisationally, without a plan. Sometimes, when the piece is finished, I find meaning in decisions that, when made, were strictly intuitive. Such is the case here, especially when I look at the pattern in the palm. It reminds me of a hand-woven basket, maybe one made by an indigenous crafts-person. It makes me think of my hands as baskets, or perhaps begging bowls, outstretched and open, willing to receive from the universe whatever I need. I love thinking about my hands that way.

There's also something child-like, playful, happy about both the pattern and colors. This makes me remember, with huge gratitude, my childhood teachers:

• my mom, who taught me to sew very early in life, guiding my hands to make neat, little stitches, and later how to embroider and make my own patterns
• my grandmother, who taught me to use her treadle sewing machine when I was only 6 years old 
• my fifth grade homeschool teacher, who taught me origami

These three women blessed me and my hands with their wisdom. My hands are a lot like my mom's were. I often think of her when I notice my hands.

Finally, it's interesting that I chose to include a bone hand charm with an eye on it. So often I think of my hands as a way of seeing, another source of vision. A friend of mine in Hungary, made a beautiful, wall piece that told her life story in textural fiber art and beading. It was one of many pieces made by Hungarian artists for a national art show for the blind, who viewed the pieces by touching them. When I closed my eyes and viewed her work with my hands, tracing and touching lightly over the surface with my finger tips, it was a whole different experience, a whole different way of knowing about my friend and her life's story.

I bet most of you readers can identify with the blessing of your hands. Take a moment to join me in giving thanks for them.

Comment Verification Removal

I guess hackers and spammers are getting better and better, because comment verification has become nearly impossible. Akkkkkkk! I've gotten it wrong and lost my whole comment so many times. Very, very frustrating. Therefore, I've decided to see how it goes without it on my blog. Go ahead - comment with abandon and don't give a thought to figuring out the indecipherable gobbledy-goook at the end!

Quilt Show, Anacortes WA

On display at The Quilt Shop in Anacortes

Batiks in jewel-tone colors... Yummmmmy!

I love the floating flying-geese border!

The machine quilting is quite nice too!

Anacortes, WA, 20 miles west of the I-5 freeway and with a population of only 17,000 or so, is an unlikely haven for fabrics and fibers. Although it's a small town, the main street boasts two very fine fabric shops, Fabrics Plus (my fave quilt shop in the whole world!) and The Quilt Shop, an equally fine yarn/fiber shop (Ana-cross Stitch), and an amazing number of very talented quilters and fiber artists.

Quilting pals, Lunnette and Cathy, joined me in a two-day get-away last weekend! We shopped at all three Anacortes stores, spent hours both days at the 2012 Quilt Show hosted by the Fidalgo Island Quilters, saw the latest show at the LaConner Quilt Museum, ate at a fabulous new restaurant in Anacortes (Frida's), stayed in the Anacortes Inn, and had a blast! I tell you, there's just nothing more satisfying than three quilting fans, away from home, with hundreds of quilts to view and fabric vendors galore! OMG, we had so much fun! All pictures are click to enlarge...

This is one of my favorite quilts in the show: Color Study by Barbara Hylton

Her applique and quilting techniques are flawless; the colors and design gorgeous!

 Only one little problem... I forgot to charge my camera battery and didn't bring the charger. Ergo: not many pictures to show. Missing are some of my favorite quilts in the show. Oh well... they were all good, as you can see below!

What a fun play of color and design!!!

Sorry, I didn't jot down artist's name. If you know it, please comment!

Most interesting to figure out how these triangles join to create the illusion of circles!

Again, help! (no artist's name). Love the polka dot background fabric used to tie colors together.

Nancy Davis must have had so much fun strip piecing, then cutting 90 degree triangles!

I love all the colors and the happy-scrappy look!

Whole-cloth quilting intrigues me a lot, especially because it might be just what I need for some of the fabrics I dyed in Ann Johnston's workshop. However, judging from the totally excellent example below, it will be a big learning curve to do this type of quilting.

"Arabesque" by Laurie Weiner - fabulous example of whole cloth quilting!

I hope she won best of show for small quilts!

There were quite a few compelling art quilts in the show. But I only took one picture. This one was made by layering cut out shapes of organza over fabric, using it and the quilting stitches to bring forward the design. I'm impressed with both her technique and design skills.

Farmers Market by Arlene Anderson

Lastly, I give you two small quilts I thought were quite fun! Then the camera battery went dead forcing me to see in a more meditative way, hoping that good ideas and inspirations will stay with me...

Ruth Mazur used a "flip and sew" method similar to crazy quilting to make this!

It really didn't need the pansy fabric centers to read "flowers"

"Free Range Chicks" by Lanne Carr

A happy quilt... as much fun from a distance as close up!