Block Printing to Apply a Design to Fabric
The oldest, and probably the slowest method of applying a design to fabric is block printing. A design is cut from a piece of wood or clay, then the block is loaded with dye from a felt pad or inked with a roller and pressed onto the fabric. The size of the block determines the size of the repeat in the pattern, although 18 inches is about as large as could be handled easily. In fancy, multicolored designs, each color required a separate block, cut in a different pattern. To be sure the alignment of the colors was accurate, metal pins, called register pins, were driven into the corners of the block, and were matched up each time the block was applied. The pins were inked along with the rest of the design, and their impressions are sometimes visible on the surface of the hand printed fabric. Fabric designers tried to hide the register pin marks, and often the marks were hidden in the center of a flower or within a group of berries. Sometimes the basic wooden blocks were modified with strips of brass, copper or iron formed into different shapes and hammered into the wood blocks. This created the more delicate areas of the design, such as outlines of individual shapes. This also made it possible to print embroidery and braid designs popular among the American colonists. Sometimes short wires were hammered closely together into the open areas of the block. When printed, these created tiny pindots in the background, called picotage, or pinwork.
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