Not the Kind of Tie-Dye We Know

On our second day in Dali, after wandering the morning market and exploring a bit of the old town, we followed our guide Nancy through a small alley way which opened into the courtyard of a traditional Chinese home. This courtyard, however, was completely taken up by two large tables covered in a thick white fabric, a gigantic wooden bucket as tall as I am, all sorts of other tools, and most strikingly, dozens and dozens of intricately patterned cloths hung from strings crisscrossing the yard, dividing the space with huge swaths of color. Most of the pieces of fabric were rectangles, a deep indigo color with white designs on them, but some were circular and others more narrow rectangles. A few were red, or green, or multicolored the way we in America generally think of tie-dye, but most were blue and they fluttered in the wind, their colors glowing brighter in the sun: it was a beautiful sight.

On the stone steps of the house a young woman sat with a mass of the dyed fabric on her knees, crumpled into a ball, and was carefully cutting small threads with scissors, apparently untangling the fabric. As we said hello and approached her however, we realized the fabric wasn't just bundled up but in fact tied together by thousands of tiny strings. Hence the “tie” part of tie-dye. After they trace a pattern onto the plain white fabric, they use a needle and thread to pull and bunch the fabric incredibly precisely to create the final design. When the tying is done and it is submerged in the dye, the parts bunched together by thread will remain white. How they know where and how to pull the fabric so that it creates these patterns is absolutely beyond me. I was used to tie dye being a t-shirt rubber-banded together in a haphazard spiral and squirted with four different colors of food coloring. What we consider tie-dye is a disgrace to the word - they sometimes even tie individual pieces of rice into the fabric to help create patterns of flowers, fish, butterflies, leaves, and more.

Once the fabric is tied - its originally about six feet by four feet - it becomes a dense circle (at least for the pattern we saw) with spires and twists and creases, and looks more like an old coral fossil than fabric. On top of the five foot tall wooden bucket sat a few pieces of wood and a pile of deep blue fabric, slowly dripping the excess dye back into the bucket, which was full nearly to the brim. The white piece will soon become blue, drip dry for a bit, then be fastidiously un-tied, hung up to dry, and then embroidered. Each piece of fabric has white thread embroidered around the pattern to define it. Sometimes this step can be done with a machine, but other than that these pieces are made entirely by hand- the one she was working on would take about 28 days from start to finish, tracing to drying. When we finally left the courtyard and headed upstairs in the house we entered a room piled high with folded fabric of all different colors. Still mostly blue, but they had all different sizes, some shirts and vests, scarves, placemats, ones even more intricate than any we’d seen downstairs, small squares and big circles, and dozens of each kind. The amount of time that must have gone into them was mind boggling.

We communicated with the woman in charge of the shop that day, the mother of the lady we’d seen downstairs untying, by using a calculator to write out prices, and each purchased something beautiful. On the way out, the grandmother (its a family business) had started tying one piece together, the white fabric draped over her knees and a tiny needle in her hand. Overall I think I’ll be reconsidering the ‘art form’ that is our tie-dye, and will certainly remain impressed by the amount of incredibly detailed work and long amounts of time that went into creating these fabrics.