Black, Sage & Blush Silk Velvet Ikat Fabric – Chequer Blocks

Blocks of black, sage green, grey and blush set in a loose chequer, each edge broken where the dye was tied into the silk before weaving. Dense pile, 40 cm wide, heavy for its width.

Product details

• Product type: handwoven silk velvet ikat (bakhmal), sold by the metre
• Origin: Margilan, Fergana Valley, Uzbekistan
• Weaving technique: warp ikat on a supplementary silk pile warp — the silk is tie-dyed before weaving, then raised over rods and cut by hand to make the pile, on a handloom
• Composition: pile 100% silk on a 100% silk ground — all-silk bakhmal, the most expensive of the velvets to weave
• Width: 40 cm (16 in)
• Main colours: black; sage green; grey; blush
• Design / motif: chequer blocks with feathered edges
• Pile direction: the nap runs one way — mark it and cut every panel the same way
• Sold by: the metre — one unit is 1 m (1.09 yd), cut in one continuous length from 1 m up
• Condition: new, uncut from the bolt
• Care: dry-clean recommended. If you wash, do it by hand in cold water, never wring, dry flat with the pile up, never iron the face — steam from the reverse to lift the pile — and store rolled rather than folded

Suitable uses

Cushions, a headboard, an ottoman top, jacket and waistcoat panels, bags. The muted palette carries into a room that already has pattern in it. More of this cloth is under Silk Velvet Ikats.

How this velvet is made

Bakhmal is the most laborious cloth Uzbek weavers make. The pattern is tied and dyed into the silk before a single pass is woven, and the weaver then works two warps at once — the ground and the supplementary silk that is lifted over rods and cut by hand, row by row, to stand up as pile. A day at the loom is measured in centimetres, not metres, which is why velvet costs several times what a flat ikat does. Fewer and fewer masters still do it: by our count only two to four remain in Uzbekistan working silk velvet ikat on a handloom, and the craft came close to dying out altogether under Soviet factory production before Margilan weavers revived it in the 2000s. Expect what the loom leaves — motif edges clouded rather than crisp, a hairline of colour shift along the length, and slight variation in pile height. Colours differ between dyelots, so order the full length you need at once. More on the difference from a printed cloth in our silk velvet at home guide.

Cut to order and dispatched from Bukhara within 24 hours by Uzbekiston Pochtasi tracked airmail: USA 9–18 working days, Europe and the UK 8–16, elsewhere 10–20.