Our Beanpaste fabric or Lan Yin Hua Bu is produced in China near Shanghai.  This cotton’s clear patterns are produced by mixing ground soya beans to a flour and mixing with water and lime to create a smooth paste.  The paste is then squeezed through a stencil onto the fabric and left to dry, and then dyed in indigo. Once the fabric is dry, the dried paste is scraped away to reveal the un-dyed parts of the fabric.  The images made by this technique are somewhat sharper than those created using the tie-dye technique and therefore are more uniform in pattern.  This fabric is sometimes also referred to as Blue Nankeen.

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