UZBEK BEAUTIFUL HAND-LOOMED NATURAL SILK IKAT ADRAS

Bold design of this ikat is full of fresh original tribal air. It is made of natural hand-made silk-ikat calls Adras. We don't mean to be alarmist, but we sometimes see "silk" that are made of something other than genuine, natural silk. Sometimes silk dealers neglect to pass on this information. Real silk is produced as the cocoon covering of the silkworm, the pupal form of the Asian or mulberry silk moth, bombyx mori. The cocoon is spun by the silk moth caterpillar of a single silk fiber that can be up to several thousand feet in length. To harvest the silk, completed cocoons are boiled or heated to kill the silkworms, then laboriously unwound into single fibers which are plied together and spun into thread or silk yarn.  Silk is extremely high in tensile strength. Real silk makes body well and skin breaths. The skill in ikat is not so much in the weaving as the dyeing. To viewers in search of the crisp colors and pattern definition that characterize woven and embroidered designs, the results might not immediately be seen as exceptional: “Out of focus” is a common description. This is, of course, part of the effect, and today, the dreamy, impressionistic look of ikats has become newly appealing. In an age of mechanization, it virtually spells “handcrafted.” The word ikat comes, however, not from Uzbek, but from the Malay verb mengikat, “to tie.” Ikat is now the word used worldwide, even though the traditional word in Central Asia was abrbandi, which joins the Persian words for “cloud”. The first entails stretching the undyed warp threads on a frame: The design of Uzbek ikats is created solely on the warp, not on the weft. The next step is to sketch on the threads an outline of the intended patterns. The threads are then removed from the frame, and water-repellent bindings of cotton and wax are tied to the parts of the threads that are not meant to be dyed in the first color. The threads are then immersed in the bath of dye. Afterward, the bindings are removed. The result is threads dyed along some parts of their length only. The dyed sections are now bound with more cotton and wax, and the bundled threads are immersed in a second dye bath. This process is repeated as many times as necessary to produce the color pattern the designer seeks. When dyeing is finished, the threads are taken to the weaving workshops. In comparison to the enormous effort expended on dyeing, the weaving is relatively simple, if laborious. The refined color scale is the main advantage of Uzbek ikat.

You can see the process of ikat producing on the photos below.

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