Praised be the queen of silks, her natural colour and lustre.

Hello everyone,

I was playing with our Muga silk over the weekend and am so much in awe that wanted to share.

 How did I ever survive not knowing about this heavenly fabric, aka the queen of silks.

The golden colour of the bow is the natural colour and lustre of Muga silk and although the colour in the photo's came out alright, it is not comparable with actually being in its presence. Did I mention this silk is not dyed? Not only is this a natural colour, but it is the natural colour of this type of silk.

I am a convert.

Many thanks go to GajendraShanane, by Royal Appointment from whom I purchased the Muga silk, and many thanks also to a very dear friend for gifting me the purple wool a few years back. They came together and make a happy pair.

Greetings from Istanbul,

Marijke Jordens

What is inside our padding?

Our kapok padding, while still hanging on the tree.

Hello everyone,

Since we believe it is important to know what you buy we like to give you some more information about our book clutches, how they came into existence and how they are made.

Nowadays people travel a lot, and even if they stay in their country, they are still always travelling. 

Now, we like to read so we always have a book or two with us. You never know we can read some on the metro, on the bus, waiting for the metro or the bus.

These books suffer! We have so many times given ourselves a hard time for the state of our book after a day or two in our handbag or backpack. For sure you know the feeling.

So that is how we started making and using our first book clutch
- and we saw it was good. And other people saw it was good so they started asking for one.

Second step, if you are going to be making clutches to help people protect their books, not just one for yourself, which fabrics will you make them in. There was no way we were going to use synthetics (poor books, imagine being wrapped around in that all day) and, since we have a fascination for textile crafts, there we went, we could use handmade and traditional fabrics (art) to design our book clutches.

So far so good.

Then clients started asking for a clutch for their kindle, their tablet, etc. So we went to the drawing board again and think, what should we use for padding. There was no way we were going to use the easily available (foam, spunge or industrial felt) options. We found our holy grail in Kapok. Our Kapok padding is made from the fibres that are the fruit of a tree, the Kapok tree. These trees grow abundantly in tropical regions and there is no extra water, care or chemicals needed for these trees to grow.

Kapok fibre

Kapok tree

That is how we ended up hand-making our own Kapok padding for our book clutches.

There was one more thing to decide, the buttons. Initially we just went with what we could find but then 2 friends pointed us towards using coconut shell for buttons. We were so happy when we found the artisan who still hand-turns these buttons so from that moment onward all our buttons are made of coconut shell. Again, this is a side product from the coconut tree. There is no extra water, care or chemicals needed to produce coconut shells. So we saw it was good.

And our book clutches were ready.

Green Lucky Clouds, block print batik, padded

That is the story behind our book clutches. A truely useful and purpose-ful product, hand made with love and care for all involved. On our website you can see our variety of book clutches, with and without padding. We sew every piece here in our atelier in Istanbul and we source the fabrics at origin on our travels, because we believe we can move into the future by preserving what is best about our past. As you take care of your books, you help us take care of the preservation of the ancient textile crafts.

Thank you for reading this post. Take care and we are looking forward to see you in our next blog post. 

Marijke Jordens

Batik, to block print or not to block print.

Block print with wax on Cotton

Hello,
for our first blog post we thought it would be wise to tell you a little about Batik.We spend a lot of time in Batik ateliers and we have come to love this art more and more every year.

Some of you may know that Batik is a resist dye technique. 'Resist dye' is quite a hands-on term for what it describes,

which is, parts of the fabric are treated so they will resist the dye. There are many different resist-dye techniques like for example mud resist-dye and tie and dye. We will touch on those in a later post.
For Batik the treatment is to cover certain areas of the fabric with hot, liquid wax so the fibers will not take the colour when dyed.

The image above and the first one below show you how our artisans apply hot wax on the cloth. In the first photo a block is used which creates a print of wax on the fabric. 

Hand drawing wax on cotton

In the second photo you can see a Canting, a type of pen if you will, which holds the liquid wax and allows the artist to draw on the fabric like you would with a pen. Also notice in the second photo that the fabric has already undergone one dye-bath. Therefore this is the second application of the wax to create the desired motif.

Now of course we need to explain what it is, "to dye" fabric. When fabric lovers use the term dye it always refers to a colour that will be applied in a bath, a dye-bath.


The fabric will be completely immersed in the dye and the artisan will apply his knowledge to make sure the dye impregnates the fabric evenly.

On this photo you see an artisan dying cotton in Indigo.

Indigo Dyeing

If areas of the fabric have been covered with wax then, after the dye-bath, the wax will be removed by boiling the fabric and melting the wax so that the motif would become visible.

We hope this post gave you some more insight in the basic Batik process. In our workshops all the different steps are completely hand done. The fact that people are responsible for all these different steps (and not machines) has some consequences.

The application of wax may be slightly different every time the block hits the fabric, the hand of the artist may draw the same motif with a slightly different flow or the shade of colour may be a bit darker or lighter when dyeing etc.
This makes for truly unique pieces of fabric.

Before we leave you we like to share one more photo.

A sunny courtyard in one of our artisans home.

As Batik is a traditional craft, many of our fabrics are made in the homes of the artisans.

Here you can see some freshly finished fabrics drying in the sun.

Batik drying on sunny courtyard

That's it for now, thank you for visiting our blog.
We look forward to welcome you again.

Marijke Jordens