Hand-block printing is one of the oldest and most exacting of the textile crafts. The process is entirely handmade. Each wooden block is carved, inked individually and applied by hand, repeat by repeat, across the length of the cloth. There is no shortcut, no mechanical equivalent, and no way to rush it. The most complex designs require over one hundred individual block impressions per repeat, and the resulting fabric carries something that no other process can replicate: the faint irregularities, the depth of colour, the unmistakable sense of a human hand at work.
The Art of Hand-Block Printing
Hand-block printing of this kind is no longer practised in the United Kingdom, not for want of tradition, but for want of apprentices. Jean Monro's printing is carried out at a specialist mill in Thailand, where the craft has been carefully maintained over generations and where the community of skilled printers has been nurtured with great dedication. It is a relationship built on mutual respect and a shared commitment to standards that the modern textile industry has largely left behind.
Among the most celebrated hand-block prints in the Jean Monro collection is the Hollyhock, a very handsome large-scale bouquet printed on heavy one hundred percent linen using one hundred and forty-six individual blocks per repeat. Probably mid-nineteenth century in origin, it is a design of considerable magnificence, requiring weeks of work to produce and rewarding that investment with a fabric of extraordinary depth, texture and presence. Lucy's Roses is perhaps the most technically ambitious design in the entire collection. One hundred and eighty block applications are required to complete each repeat of this grand bouquet of overblown roses, printed on pure linen. Last produced commercially in the 1950s, though dating originally from circa 1870, it is a fabric that rewards close attention and improves, as all great things do, with every passing year. Rose and Fern, an English hand-block design of 1859, brings a different energy altogether. Flamboyant and exuberant, it places roses, lilac and ferns against a vibrant blue ground in an all-over design of great confidence and richness. Each repeat requires eighty-five block applications, producing a fabric that fills a room with colour and rewards the decision to use it generously.
Then there is Willa, a stunning large-scale floral of great beauty and technical complexity, printed on one hundred percent slub linen using eighty-six blocks and twenty-two colours per colourway. The very soft, painterly colour graduation is achieved by layering one colour at a time, producing a three-dimensional quality that no other method of printing could achieve. Each of these fabrics takes weeks to produce. Each one is different from the last. And each carries within it the mark of the hands that made it, which is, in the end, precisely the point.
