All posts tagged: silk

A fabric tour around the world: The Far East (and the rest)

Last week our fabric tour took us to India, where we visited Kashmir and a number of villages along the Coromandel Coast. Since then I have learned that kohlrabi is the most commonly eaten vegetable in Kashmir.  This has nothing to do with textiles, or this weeks wrap of the textile tour, but I still thought it was interesting. This week we tour to Far East (mostly China), and the rest of the world, which hasn’t done a very good job of getting textiles named after it. For our tour we could go anywhere in China, to commemorate crêpe de Chine and china silk. Guangzhou and Guangzhou Province were known as Canton before the 20th century, and give us Canton crepe. Shandong Province gives us silk shantung, the characteristic irregular dupioni-type silk fabric that is one of its major exports. Quanzhou in Fujian Province gave us satin, as the port was called Zaitun by the Middle Eastern traders who first brought it to Europe. Outside of China, but still in the far east,  Thailand is …