I can weave!

Along the lines of making dreams come true, Ruby, Melinda and I spent today at a silk dyeing and weaving workshop at the famed Ock Pok Tok Living Arts Centre in Luang Prabang, Laos.  Given that it's low season, it was just the three of us learning from a group of rockin' master artisans.  

After learning about the process for making natural dyes, we each picked three colors and prepared and dyed our own silk skeins.  

undyed silk

We chopped sappan wood, picked annatto tree seeds, tore teak leaves, and pounded indigo leaves.  

indigo leaves

teak leaf

The silk is either soaked in a boiling dye or a cold, fermented dye.  Ash (seen below next to indigo), lime and alum are used as fixitives.

fermented indigo and ash

The difference between the process of making the pink and red you see below was the simple addition of a rusty nail to the pot.

After the dyeing lesson, we moved into weaving.  We picked two colors to weave  into a scarf and learned how to spin the silk thread onto bobbins.  

The afternoon was devoted to weaving on traditional standing looms used in northern Laos.  Back strap weaving like that done in South America is more prevalent in southern Laos.

We worked through a rain storm in an open air pavilion on the Mekong River.  

Luckily, we each had a dedicated master weaver at our side.

It was meditative, exhausting, and humbling.  Each loom contains hundreds of silk threads comprising the warp (which can break easily!), foot peddles, combs, a wooden paddle, various levels for feeding the shuttle, and a beater for making each row even.  Adding a contrasting pattern (we learned the supplementary weft method) was even more complicated, involving the moving of individual silk strands for each pass of the shuttle.  I was able to do each step only with a great deal of assistance.  

Here's my final product, still on the loom, with shuttle holding bobbins on top.  A small scarf with a double naga pattern took me three solid hours at the loom.  I will prize this piece of silk forever!