Technicolor Dreamcoats: Central Asian Ikat Robes: Making Ikats

Specialized workshops prepared the warp threads for the weavers of a variety of silk fabrics. At the height of ikat production in the late 19th century, the cosmopolitan city of Bukhara had a number of workshops dedicated to making warp threads solely for ikat fabrics (1). For every loom, over 200 yards of warp thread had to be spun, whitened, stretched and divided into bundles before a pattern could be drawn upon them. Before dyeing, warp thread also had to be soaked in alum, a mordant that fixed the dye permanently to the fiber.

The first step in the patterning process was to wrap bundles of threads on the patterning frame, two wooden beams placed 8 to 10 feet apart. The distance between the beams determined the length of the pattern repeat, which formed a mirror image of itself on either side of them (3). The points of contact with the beams were often kept bound throughout the dying process. They served as reference points in the consecutive installing and de-installing of the bundles on the patterning frame, which occurred for every color application. These points of reference are the lighter horizontal jagged "parting" lines seen on many ikat panels.

Once the bundles were on the patterning frame, a designer marked the threads with washable black dye or charcoal to delineate the motifs. Before each dye bath, selected sections of the bundles were wrapped with thick waterproof cloth or greasy cotton string to prevent them from coming in contact with the dyestuff. Every color required the tying, dyeing, untying, stretching and drying of the bundles. The dyer, who charged according to the size of the item, the number of dye baths and the depth of color desired (3), sent the wet bundles back to the workshops for this process between dippings. Several weeks could go by before the thread was ready to be placed on the loom.

All ikats were woven in fairly narrow strips on simple warp-weighted looms. The weaver raised and lowered a series of harnesses with his feet, creating a passageway for a shuttle that contained the weft thread. Although a starch-like vegetable paste was applied to the warp threads to help them withstand the tension and keep them in line, distortion always occurred. This, along with the dyeing process, explains the blurry outline of the motifs on the finished cloth. After weaving, the fabric was pounced with an egg white emulsion applied with a wooden hammer and polished with a semi-sphere of glass to give the fabric a brilliant reflective shine (4).

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(1) Kate Fitz Gibbon and Andrew Hale, Ikat: Splendid Silks of Central Asia: the Guido Goldman Collection (Lawrence King Publishing in Association with Alan Marcuson Publishing, 1999), 81.
(2) Jack Lenor Larsen, The Dyer's Art: Ikat, Batik, Plangi, (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976), 170.
(3) Gibbon and Hale, 88.
(4) Johannes Kalter, ed., Uzbekistan: Heirs to the Silk Road (Thames and Hudson, 1997), 223. Gibbon and Hale, 83, 91.