Orchid Purple & Cream Silk Ikat Fabric – Eyed Almonds

Purple almonds in close columns on cream. Purple is a late arrival in Uzbek dyeing and still one of the harder colours to hold evenly across a warp this long.

Product details

• Composition: 50% silk, 50% cotton
• Width: 50 cm
• Sold by: the metre — one unit is one metre, cut to order in a continuous length
• Weaving technique: warp ikat — the warp threads are tie-dyed to the pattern before weaving, then woven on a handloom
• Main colours: orchid purple on cream
• Motif: eyed almonds stacked in narrow columns
• Care: Hand wash at 30 °C or dry-clean; dry in the shade; iron on the reverse while slightly damp
• Origin: handwoven in Margilan, Fergana Valley, Uzbekistan

What it suits

Dressmaking, curtains, cushion fronts, or a lining. More cloths of this kind.

How this cloth is made

The pattern is tied and dyed into the warp threads before a single row is woven — abrbandi, the cloud-binding, is the local name for it. The weaver works to a design that exists only as knots on a stretched warp, and every extra colour means another round of tying and dyeing. That is why the edges feather rather than cut sharp, and why no two metres are quite identical. Woven on a handloom in Margilan, in the Fergana Valley.

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.