
Beanpaste Fabric
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 picked off 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.