| Natural Dyes | |||
| Dong took me to her workshop, and also to a Japanese-sponsored center training women to weave and dye with natural dyes. These photos are from the center and from the demo session. | |||
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| The annatto tree. Annatto used to dye butter yellow in the U.S.--look on the ingredients list of your butter, sometime. | An annatto seed pod. They're beautiful, heart-shaped and sort of furry. | More seed pods. The strongly colored seeds are used for a beautiful, strong, yellow-orange. Unfortunately, though, it is fugitive--it fades with washing and exposure to light. | Coconut husks. They produce a lovely rose color. |
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| Jackfruit. A highly versatile tree (and a relative of the smelly durian fruit), it produces giant, sweet fruits and a nice yellow-orange color from the heartwood. | Ma klua (Thai ebony) fruits soaking. Ma klua has a very short season, but the fruits are so rich in tannin that they can be dumped into water and kept year-round, as in the photo. It dyes brown to grey to black, depending on the strength and method. | Two skeins dyed with Ma klua. | Chopped up roots of a woody vine (no English name) that Dong used in the dyeing demo. |
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| Skeins of reeled silk. It still has the sericin (gum exuded by silkworms to make the silk stiff/sticky) in it, so it is stiff. The sericin must be removed before dyeing. |
Scouring away the sericin, by simmering in soapy water. Notice the wood burner at the bottomto turn up the burner, push the board in, to turn it down, pull the board out. Almost all cooking in Laos is done over wood stoves. |
The roots simmering in the dyebath. They produce a very strong yellow color, but it apparently fades over time. | Dong, stirring the yarn in the pot with a glass bottle (the equivalent of a chemist's glass rod). |
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| Dong with her dyed skeins. She has an astonishing array of colors--she learned from her mother. | A collection of indigo-dyed skeins I bought from her. They are all dyed with indigo, using different methods--the lavender, left, involved soaking the indigo for three days, then boiling a dyebath; the silver, right, was made by pouring a bottle of Lao whisky into a barrel of indigo leaves and water, leaving it for three weeks, and then boiling the dyebath. This is a traditional recipe! |
Indigo dyevats at the Japanese weaving center. Indigo is nearly unique among natural dyes in that it is a vat dye--it is dyed cold and the color is built up through successive dips. Natural indigo contains both indigo blue and indigo red--they are both vat dyes, but dye at slightly different temperatures. A cold dyebath gives a bluish cast, a warm dyebath a redder blue. |
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| Textiles from a small textile collection. Take a closer look--the intricacy is amazing. | Another textile from the same exhibit. | Woman's blanket from Huaphanh Province. The red diamond is typical of the Tai tribes...Lao has something like 56 different groups of hilltribes. | Closeup of the diamond pattern. Intricate work like this is all over Laos, usually at very cheap prices ($12 for cotton, $30-80 for silk). |
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| A stunningly beautiful mudmee piece. The weft was ikat-dyed before weaving, which makes the accuracy absolutely astonishing. Some old and very experienced Lao weavers tried to reproduce this--but could not. | A closeup of the mudmee piece. Each of the little bands of color is about 1/16" across--and the accuracy is within 1/32". Considering that this is weft-dyed, and not warp-dyed, this is just amazing. Remember that most of these weavers are illiterate, too! | A modern design (foreground)--a pregnant deer (one deer inside another). | |
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| Here's how these exquisite textiles are woven. First, a set of string heddles are strung from floor to the top of the loom. Then, pattern-strings are inserted, one string for each "pattern pick", recording the correct pattern. | Pattern-sticks are actually more traditional than pattern-strings, but allow for fewer patterns... | The weaver pulls on a single pattern-thread, bringing forward all the threads that will be lifted up in this throw of the shuttle. | She then tugs up all the forward threads while inserting a flat bamboo stick. This stick, when turned edgewise, will raise all the forward threads, thus translating the pattern from the string to the warp. |
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The beauty of this method is that it allows a given pattern to be reused multiple times--so the weaver need only pick out the pattern once. After that, it's recorded in the pattern-strings and can be transported from loom to loom. | ...so, a 2-yard piece can easily represent a month of a weaver's time. The end results are glorious, though. | |
| The emerging fabric. Once she finishes this throw of the shuttle, she takes the pattern thread out of the top, reinserts it below the loom, and continues with the next pattern thread. | These textiles take a very long time to weave...a highly skilled weaver can weave between 1.5" and 9" in a day, depending on the complexity of the pattern. | ||
