In Sanganer, a village near Jaipur, Mr Choudhary and his family run their textiles business. They specialise in hand block printing techniques, a craft that dates back centuries and it takes a lot of learning, patience and craftsmanship to print bedspreads to the high standards set by the award winning Choudharys.

Mr Choudhary has been running the business for many years and working with him are his immediate family and his more distant relatives.

We''ll tell you more about the printing process in a moment, but first a little something about the area.

The city of Jaipur is located in the state of Rajasthan in north west India. The climate is one of searing heat for most of the year and when the monsoons finally arrive they only stay for a short time. It is an area famous for its abundance of ornate palaces that, in their day, would have been the perfect places of retreat from the heat of the midday sun.

Their marble floors and small fountains were surrounded by mirrored walls festooned with richly printed cottons, all combining to ensure that the resident royals be as comfortable, and as cool, as possible.

So beautiful were those fabrics that many of today's block printers are still influenced by fabric patterns from the Rajasthani palaces and Moghul forts. The Choudhary family have helped to guide us on our pattern selection for the Exclusive Collection so that we can bring you a touch of the opulent east without the need for you to find a royal purse!

The Choudharys workshop consists of 7 long tables on which lengths of cotton are placed when ready for printing. The buntas, wooden blocks which have been carved to form a relief pattern, are then dipped into a specific colour and pressed onto the fabric at specific intervals.

The process is repeated with different colours and different patterns. The more colours and the more intricate the pattern the longer it takes to complete each bedspread, and our Exclusive Collection varies from crisp and clean motifs in a single colour to intricate multi coloured styles.

Once printed the bedspreads are left to dry in the heat of the sun - sometimes hanging from wooden canes, sometimes left on the desert floor. It's fantastic to see them there contrasting so vividly with the harsh landscape.

This part of Jaipur is full of small businesses that are connected together to complete the textiles process. There are spinners to provide the original cloth, printers to colour the fabric, and finishers to stitch hems and labels. In this way the production of our bedspreads has not only given work to one family business but to several.

Visit our Exclusive Collection to see the full range of bedspreads on offer. Fantastic items ethically sourced through our Fair Trade system. All in soft fine cotton.