fashionweaver: Making progress but not friends....

Yesterday we visited a shop selling ikats from all the different regions of Nusa Tenggara. What was interesting was that the fabrics we were all drawn to were the older ones. As the shop assistant noticed this she kept disappearing around the back of the shop and pulling out other things that had not been on display. What was so appealing about the older fabrics was that they seemed to be much finer, softer and the colouring was more subtle. When we asked her why the older fabrics were so interesting to us she pointed out something that we hadn't noticed before. The older fabrics were made with much finer yarns, always weaving a one thread plain weave, whilst the new fabrics often doubled up the yarns to make the weaving quicker but the fabrics felt too heavy and had no drape.

This reinforced what we had been trying to achieve with the weavers earlier in the day. I had been explaining to them how to use less threads in the warp and the weft, but they had seemed very resistant. I now realised that this had been because they were worried about the extra work that would be involved. The ikat pieces usually have a fixed price per piece and don't always take into account how long it has taken to weave them so they were naturally worried that what I was trying to get them to do would mean that they would lose money. Oscar managed to reassure them that if the pieces felt more luxurious as they would if they used finer yarns then he would be happy to pay extra for them, they nodded in agreement but I'm not sure that we have sold it to them yet.

We then spent the rest of the day explaining to them how to use the new finer threads that we had brought and not to double up the yarn. It was then that I started to realise how irritating I must seem to them!! They have spent the last 10 years finding ways to make the weaving faster and more efficient and I'm basically telling them to stop all that and go back to how it used to be done, I must be so irritating to them. hopefully once the project is finished they will see the bigger picture, that although they will be producing less the quality will be higher and therefore the price as well. They smile sweetly as I attempt to show them this, but its probably a good thing that I don't speak any Indonesian!

A weaver from Kefa working on a trial with new yarn