Ikat silk with cotton No. 18, 3 meters

Cut 3 meters, width 45-48 cm. Real piece of fabric in the photo. Uzbek fabrics with a specific pattern have become a UNESCO world cultural heritage site. Their bright pattern is recognizable all over the world. These fabrics appeared at the beginning of a new era and became the hallmark of the region. They cannot be confused with anything today. It turned out that even today fabrics with national prints are very popular in Uzbekistan: they are used to sew clothes (and wear them!), they decorate interiors. I was lucky to meet a family that has been selling ikat in Bukhara for many years, the owner of the shop is also a fashion designer, and according to her sketches, local craftswomen sew clothes that fly all over the world. She told me that there are several types of Uzbek fabrics and their features. Ikat is the name of a specific way of creating a pattern. It is formed when using threads with partial dyeing, they form a pattern. But ikat weaving is not a unique oriental tradition; it is also found among the peoples of Africa, in Indonesia. But the peculiarity of ikat in Central Asia is that the pattern is formed only by longitudinal threads, the transverse threads are always monophonic. Traditional patterns had their own symbolic meaning, some combinations protect from enemies, some help to attract wealth, etc. But the pattern is always positive. They do not have that flashy brightness at all, which we often see in the attire of modern Uzbek women. Traditional fabrics do not use chemical dyes, so they are more restrained in palette, although color combinations are quite bold. In Uzbekistan, the tradition of hand weaving has been preserved, craftsmen create ikat fabrics from different materials. Most often, cotton fabrics - adras - are used by the local population. They sew everyday clothes from it, make various things for the interior. The variety of cotton adras is amazing. Silk adras is used for elegant clothes. It is so flowing, shiny, tender. Sometimes silk is very thin, but more often there is a rather thick and dense silk fabric, with an elastic texture. Silk adras can be simply incredible beauty, but it costs more. The most expensive fabric is khan-atlas, a dense silk fabric, it is distinguished by the brightness of colors and brilliance. There is also ikat, which is woven from silk and cotton, less plastic and not with such a spectacular sheen, but also more accessible and double-sided. For the manufacture of men's dressing gowns, a different fabric is used - striped bekasab, it is woven from a mixture of silk and cotton. The fabric is pleasant to wear, and the colors are always pleasing to the eye. By the way, in recent years, ikat has been very fond of couturiers all over the world, specific patterns can be seen in many collections of 2022-2023 by famous fashion designers: from Dior, Ralph Laren, Balenciaga and Oscar de la Renta to Zara and other mass-market bands - motifs are found everywhere now ikat. In 2023, ikat is on the rise! It makes trendy and incredibly stylish clothes. Features of handmade fabrics are a narrow width (45-48 cm), at certain intervals (from 80 to 120 cm) there is a white undercoat on the fabric - a slope, these are traces of fastening to the frame. Like all natural fabrics, ikat will shrink when washed and should be washed with care as the colors may fade. Ikat is ideal in the interior: decorative pillows, tablecloth decoration (stripes), bedspreads, panels, decorative curtains are sewn from it.