fashionweaver: I arrived.....and then I left.

So 15 hours and 4 movies later I arrived. F.Y.I. Invictus ( can't believe I cried over a rugby match!), Crazy Heart (love Maggie Gyllenhaal), Twilight-New Moon (definitely still rooting for Edward although the werewolf one looks much better with short hair!) and something else I fell asleep to and can't remember. It was already dark when I got to Jakarta so didn't get a chance to really see the city. Went straight out to dinner with Oscars mother Reggy, and her husband Nick. Very warm and friendly people, then headed back to their house where I'm staying. Realised we had a very early start the next morning to catch a flight to Kupang in Nusa Tenggara region and went to bed. See below the badly photographed map of the island, mostly for my Dads benefit who will assume I don't know where I am! I do!

I'm on the island to the right of the picture in Kupang, the place with all the arrows coming from it.

The Island was chosen as a base to meet all the weavers from the region. We arrived on the Kupang in the afternoon and went straight to the venue where the weavers were starting to set up. There are 5 groups of weavers that had been chosen because of their particular specialities and also the fact that they are open minded about developing their fabrics. I will go into greater detail later about their different techniques but for now there are too many Indonesian words that I don't know how to spell and need to check with Oscar, probably easier just to show you some pictures.

We spent the rest of the afternoon discussing how we could develop their fabrics, mostly to make them lighter and softer as some of the weights can be too stiff and heavy to wear. We had brought them some new yarns to trial and handed them out with instructions on how to use them .As we were leaving they had a power cut at the centre. Amazingly this didn't stop the weavers and they just carried on by candlelight, see below!

Ikat weaver from Ende starting her warp