Traditional Uzbek cloth.

 

 

Printed cloth

 

For millennia, various types of printed cloth have been produced in Central Asia. Multicoloured silk was used for making clothes, curtains, and other items. In the 7th and 8th centuries, Sogdian silk called zandanatchi (after the name of the town Zandana, near Bukhara) was already famous. The designs enclosed in the medallions, surrounded with pearls represented supernatural animals (winged animas with four legs) and real ones (elephants, goats, birds), plant patterns, mythological scenes, religious cults. The making of cloth continued throughout the 9th and 10th centuries with a mixture of cotton. In those days, the principal centres of cloth production were Merv, Bukhara, and Samarkand. Weaving attained its apogee in between the 14th and 16th centuries in the kingdom of the Timurids. The written sources tell us so, and so do the cloth models which can be examined in the miniatures.

 

In the 17th and the 18th centuries, plain and illustrated zandanatchis were made of cotton, wool, silk, and mixed silk, and also of cotton cloth, velvet, and satin. The production of silk and half-silk cloth represents an originality in Asian weaving of the 19th-early 20th centuries. With this type of cloth the weft thread determined the decoration; that is why it was slightly displaced on the loom, causing blurred lines and the forming of designs recalling the outlines of clouds. Printing cloth by means of a stencil was traditional. Stencils were used for making dresses, shawls, but also tablecloths, curtains, and blankets. Bukhara was the indisputable centre of this craft, but the cloths of Samarkand, Ferghana, Khujand, and Tashkent were also very much appreciated. In the 19th-early 20th century, printed cloth still existed in various colours. But from then on, only red and black designs were printed on cloth. For the manufacturing of printed cloth they just used cotton cloth, soaked in a special liquid on which the design was transferred with the help of engraved plates. The designs were abstract or represented bushes with dense foliage, gracious buds, entangled branches with leaves, pomegranates, and almonds alternating in a rhythmical way.