Rajexx — Rajasthan's stepwells (baori, baoli and vav) as | rajexx.com
Ordered steps from scouring and harda pretreatment through printing, drying, washing and sun-bleaching.
The cloth starts with scouring: washing out the sizing, oils and dust so the fibre will take dye evenly. Cloth that skips this step prints blotchy and washes out early.
Harda pretreatment follows. Harda, a natural mordant, is applied and dried so the fibre is ready to bond with the vegetable colour that comes next; without it the dye sits on the surface instead of in the fibre.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Printing comes after the cloth is dry and flat. Each block is inked, aligned to the previous impression and pressed; the sequence runs outline, filler, background with drying between passes.
After printing the cloth is dried, then washed to remove excess dye, then sun-bleached. Sun-bleaching uses open daylight to fix and brighten the colours, and it is the step most often shortened when work is rushed.
The full run therefore reads: scour → harda → print → dry → wash → sun-bleach, in that order, with no step skipped.
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