What is Ikat?

A Japanese weaver weaving a warp-dyed ikat, using indigo-dyed cotton. Jyo81 (ja: User) [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)]

When I was in Japan many years ago, I visited an artisan village, where traditional Japanese crafts were preserved and demonstrated.  I was stunned by the beauty and intricacy of the Yuuki tsumugi 結城紬, a meticulously yarn-dyed silk from that region.  I tried on a multi-colored silk kimono that made me feel like a mermaid, so beautiful was it, in greens and blues and pinks.  It cost more than my parents' house!  My host-father said he thought the dyeing process was needlessly complicated, but I appreciated it very much!

Today, I want to talk about ikat fabric, because I find it fascinating.  Ikat (say "EEE-kat") is a yarn-dyed fabric where the yarns are selectively resist dyed before weaving, and the pattern emerges once woven.  Some pictures in this post are from Wikimedia Commons (click to see their sourcepages).  The ones that don't go to Wikimedia Commons are my own pictures. 

an ikat fabric

CLOSE UP of ikat. This is a warp-dyed ikat

So what is the dying process?  In Japanese, it's called kasuri 絣; in English we use the Indonesian word ikat.  To start with, let's say you're working with silk threads.  You stretch the warp yarns on the loom and decide to make a zig-zag pattern.  So, using cotton threads, you tie knots around the warp threads in the zig zag.  Then you un-thread the loom, and dunk the silk/cotton bundle in water.  Cotton is super absorbent, and takes on far more water than silk does, so the cotton fibers swell.  Then you dunk the wet bundle in a dye vat with indigo dye.  Both silk and cotton fibers get indigo dyed, but the silk that was tied up inside the cotton does not get dyed, because it was protected by the water-saturated cotton knots.  In other words, the parts that got tied resisted the dye.  When you carefully untie all the knots, the silk thread underneath is still white there, though indigo everywhere else.  Then you re-string the loom, and if you're careful, you can re-string it the same way as before, thus re-creating the original warp thread configuration, but now with a white zig zag pattern on an indigo ground!  Then you weave the weft threads through to make the fabric. 

Of course, it's not possible to get the dye resist perfectly uniform, nor to get the dyed threads re-strung exactly as before, so the zig zag pattern is not perfect.  There is a slight fuzziness or wiggliness to the lines.  The fuzzy edges are characteristic of ikat, and part of its charm: their very inexactness highlights how exacting and meticulous the dye technique is! 

The two pictures below, taken by Midori and posted on Wikimedia Commons, show three stages of the process: the first picture shows the warp threads gathered in bundles and stretched out over the loom, as they would be when woven.  In this position, they'll be resist-dyed.  The second picture shows the dyed warp threads at the top right, and the woven fabric showing the pattern at the bottom left. 

Preparing warp threads. Tenun Ikat Lombok, Indonesia.

Warp threads ready to be woven. Tenun Ikat Lombok, Indonesia.

The more colors an ikat has, the more times the individual threads had to be strung, tied, dyed, restrung, tied in different places, and dyed again.  The more complex the patterns are, the better the weaver's control over the whole time-consuming and complicated process. 

The resist dyeing can be done as I described, with knots, or it can be done with wax.  Presumably, you could paint or dip-dye the strands, too, to get the same effect, but I don't know if people do.

An Ikat fabric from the Indonesian island of Sumba. Circa 1980 or before. This looks to be a double-ikat: the fuzzy lines go both directions. Also, is that a LOBSTER hanging off his... oh dear! Photo by Sam [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

An ikat is a kasuri 絣 in Japanese.  The k-sound turns into a hard-g when it's put in a compound word. 
A warp ikat (tategasuri 緯絣) has the warp threads dyed and the weft threads a solid color.  The designs will be vertical, parallel to the selvedge, with the fuzzy lines running up and down. 
A weft ikat (yokogasuri 経絣) has the weft threads dyed and the warp threads a solid color.  The designs have more horizontal look, with the fuzzy lines running side to side. 
A double ikat is when both warp and weft threads are dyed.  I don't know if Japanese gives a word to this, but they do have the word for a complex double ikat where figural patterns or pictures emerge in the intersections of dyed and undyed spots: egasuri 絵絣, or picture kasuri. 
A compound ikat is when one textile shows several techniques in different parts of it. 

Kasuri fragment from an early 20th century kimono using the E-gasuri technique to create a picture of sparrows. This is also an iro gasuri in that it uses several colors. Photo by Chris Hazzard [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Ikats are found in cultures around the world.  I am most familiar with the Japanese ones, because of my experience traveling there and my interest in kimono, but ikats are found in South America, India, and other places.  In the west, they come into fashion every now and then, either as a result of trade or a fascination with things perceived as "primitive" or "ethnic".  Cheap prints that imitate ikats will have geometric patterns with the fuzzy edges of an ikat, but if you look at the back of the fabric, it looks different, un-printed.  That's how you know you're looking at a printed picture of an ikat, and not the real deal.  Because true ikats are yarn-dyed, the back looks the same as the front, the same as a yarn-dyed stripe or plaid. 

A printed faux-ikat. Notice the back is different from the front.

(Thanks to the Japanese Architecture and Art Net Users System for the Japanese ikat vocabulary I use in this post!)