95% rural families in Nantong area use self-spun and self-woven white cloth to print blue printed cloth to make various daily necessities. In the past hundred years, the only calico that people get along with day and night is blue calico. This kind of blue-and-white cloth, rooted in folk customs, embodies the national psychological characteristics and becomes the medium for farmers to convey and exchange their inner feelings.

Due to the limitation of technology, the pattern composition of blue calico is affected by the broken knife. Folk artists should not only consider the durability of patterns, but also consider the image characteristics of carved patterns. Artists skillfully use bold and exaggerated techniques to describe the auspicious and wishful artistic conception that the public likes, create many simple and naive and colorful images of flowers, trees, birds and animals, and interpret many Han folk fairy tales.

In pattern modeling, the dots and lines in white flowers with blue background are the main ones, and sometimes the pattern is composed of pure dots. In the blue flowers with white background, the dots, lines and surfaces are generally staggered, and the patterns are mostly rough and powerful, and their shapes are full of fantasy. Many of them still retain the traces of primitive art, and their pattern combinations are rough but not dull, but not cumbersome, giving people the enjoyment of blue and white beauty. The dots of the blue calico pattern not only have the meaning of auspiciousness, many children and grandchildren, but also can be regarded as dotted lines and imaginary faces when they are dense. Its lines and pens are disconnected, with a sense of direction and a strong expressive force for change and movement. In the long-term practice, artists use its straightness, thickness, length and other changes, combined with different image characteristics, flexible use, and properly show the texture and structure of the image. Whether it is scenery, people, animals and plants, etc. We can use points, lines and surfaces to describe image features and carve them into various shapes, such as chrysanthemum petals, peony petals and plum petals. It highly refines and generalizes nature, regularizes natural images, and makes patterns reflect nature through processing, but they are not bound by nature.

Folk blue calico has a strong local flavor, so far it is especially loved by cities and white-collar groups. Suitable for folk daily decoration, can be used as clothing, head cloth, quilt cover, cloth bag, bag, door curtain and so on.

In recent years, with the improvement of people's aesthetic concept of folk printing and dyeing crafts, blue calico has developed from single-sided printing to double-sided printing, from monochrome to multicolor, from printed small cloth to wide cloth, from pure cotton to printed silk, cotton silk and other varieties of calico.