Warm Heart Creates Eri Silk

Greetings. My name is Eileen Eisele and I am honored to be guest blogging for TAMMACHAT. For the past 3 months our family has been volunteering at Warm Heart, a non-profit based in northern Thailand. I am here with my husband Greg and fairly agreeable 11-year-old daughter Joji. Warm Heart is a community-based NGO that works towards empowering rural Thai villagers through education, health and microenterprise initiatives. I was thrilled to meet Alleson and Ellen on one of their scheduled rounds to collect an order of scarves they placed earlier in the year with the Warm Heart weaving partnership.

Part of my volunteer assignment was to help with marketing materials for the microenterprise program. My background as a photo stylist for catalogs and commercial photo shoots has taught me one thing -- a picture is worth a thousand words. Having no prior knowledge of weaving it was with utter fascination I started documenting the incredibly multilayered process of a hand-loomed textile, from creepy crawly Eri silkworm to sensational silky scarf.

I present to you the story of a Warm Heart scarf.

Warm Heart weavers are located at the Warm Heart Children's Home and at the Pa Dang Temple. At the Children's Home, the looms sit under a converted rice barn; upstairs is the children’s library.

Eri silkworms munching away on lahoun leaves -- their job: to eat, grow and poop (which, I am told, makes a tasty tea).

Soft Eri cocoons in their "cocoon condo." After the cocoon is spun, it is cut open and the pupae released -- to become a moth, lay eggs and die, or be eaten as a tasty fried snack.

Soaking the cocoons -- this softens them and removes the stiff seracin so they can be fluffed and spun into threads.

A bundle of fluffy Eri silk fibers dries in the sun -- next the fibers will be separated by hand, ready for spinning.

Rattana, a nun at the Pa Dang Temple (Wat) spins on a wheel made from a recycled bicycle rim.

Mae Joom's experienced hands spin the silk fibers into thread. Eri silk is incredibly unique in that it has the rough texture of a cotton wool mix but the softness of silk.

Mae Joom, Warm Heart's head weaver and trainer, prepares the "Deer’s Ears" leaves for the dye bath.

Newly dyed strands of Eri silk dry in the sun. The dyeing takes several steps to reach the desired color. In the next step the pink will become dark espresso brown.

Cotton and silk threads are wound and ready to be set up on the handloom. TAMMACHAT's Eri silk scarves use traditional Mulberry silk and/or cotton for the warp threads with Eri silk for the weft.

The handloom under the rice barn is prepared for the TAMMACHAT order, which takes several weeks to complete.

Loom detail -- I was a little obsessed by the beauty of the these hand-built looms, wonders of wood and metal recycling, just gorgeous.

Rattana and her assistant work at the loom at the wat, adjusting the warp threads as they weave.

Sripan sets up the warp threads on the handloom. This is an important and time consuming step.

Ann weaves a TAMMACHAT Moss Green Agate scarf with great concentration. Twelve to 14 scarves in one design are woven at a time.

P'Yada holds her daughter Popiya, who was ever present on weaving days. All the weavers helped entertain her while P'Yada worked the loom.

Sanom, a PaDang nun displays the subtle cream and espresso Eri silk and cotton TAMMACHAT scarf still on the loom.

A shuttle holds Eri silk threads -- the texture is nubbly but oh so soft. It gives the finished scarf a beautiful texture.

Loom heddles guide the loom to create the intricate patterns -- I did mention I was obsessed.

TAMMACHAT scarves are now finished -- Joom and Moss Green Agate, which is now available online.

Coming to a neck near you -- detail of the Ivory and Ebony Eri silk scarf shows the finished espresso brown color.

Sripan and me -- they are happy to turn the camera on me for a change. I learned so much from these weavers.

[Note from Ellen of TAMMACHAT: We are thrilled to get to know and begin to work with Warm Heart, which is doing important work to help children, help reduce poverty and help villagers empower themselves in northern Thailand. We're also thrilled to see younger women carrying on weaving traditions and creating new ones with Eri silk.]

Fair trade fibre art and art quilt samplers

While we usually trade with weaving groups directly, we occasionally buy from other organizations that share our values and vision. Sop Moei Arts, with showrooms in Chiang Mai and Bangkok, is a case in point.

Sop Moei Arts is a self-supporting, non-profit organization that grew out of a public health project founded in 1977 and funded by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA). In its first decade, the project focused on maternal and children’s health of Pwo Karen villagers in the remote Sop Moei district of Mae Hong Son province in northern Thailand. During this time there were no other health facilities in the area. Indeed there were no roads and the only access available was by boat, elephant or a trek on foot.

More than 30 years later, the project has grown to provide a fair income for hundreds of Pwo Karen villagers while preserving women’s traditional textile weaving and men’s basketry skills. We've known of this project for years, but have only recently discovered sampler packs of their fabrics to share with art quilters and other fibre artists in our part of the world.

Handwoven textile samplers from Sop Moei Arts

While the Pwo Karen weavers do not use natural dyes, their strong patterns -- re-interpretations of Pwo Karen traditional fabrics -- are perfect for incorporating into art quilts or fibre art projects of all kinds. The packs of six or seven small squares, measuring 5" x 5", combined with three larger squares of 6 3/4" offer palettes in oranges, reds, blues, greens or tans.

These will be available, along with other samplers of hand-reeled, naturally dyed, organic silks, at our booth in the Merchant Mall at Quilt Canada 2012 from May 29 - June 2, 2012 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Check our website for details.

PSST:  Those interested in children's books and education might find interesting this video that documents a bilingual education program for Pwo Karen in Thailand.

Ellen and Alleson

Photo essay: Cotton Weaving in Northern Thailand

Junhom Bantan is a Northern Thai weaving group that specializes in eco-friendly, natural dyes and handweaving. They weave with handspun cotton, as well as stronger, unbleached cotton yarns. TAMMACHAT Natural Textiles has been working with this group since 2007, building a fair trade relationship. On Christmas Day, 2011, we began a 2-day visit to the small villages where group members live and work. These cultural traditions are still alive and well, thanks to the efforts of Mai, the woman who acts as the group's manager,and whose mother started the group many years ago. A keen interest in natural fibres and natural dyes in Japan, as well as other countries, continues to provide a market for their eco-textiles.

[Photos and text copyright Ellen Agger 2011. Please ask for permission to use them.]

Mai, who manages Junhom Bantan now, stands in front of the small village shop with her mother who started the village natural dyeing/weaving group many years ago. Most customers, like TAMMACHAT Natural Textiles, now visit the village to make special orders.

A sampling of cotton threads show some of the natural colours available from leaves, barks and insect resin. This group specializes in earth tones in interesting combinations.

Juhom Bantan's breezy cotton scarf in shades of blue is available from TAMMACHAT's online shop.

The dyeing area, in the shade for comfort and protection for the dyers, houses dye materials, a chopping machine for dye materials, yarns, dye pots that simmer over fires, 2 spin dryers to wring out the dyed yarn, and a drying area out of the sun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mai's paa (father) and sister do most of the group's dyeing now.

 

 

The fruit of the ebony plant creates a rich, dark brown.

This machine chops bark into small pieces so it can be used multiple times to create dyes. The chips are later composted.

Unbleached cotton yarns steep in a dye bath, soaking up a tan colour from bark of a local tree.

Unbleached cotton is lightly dyed and hung to dry.

The blue dye is created from hom, a leaf in the same family as the more famous indigo plant. It has been collected in the wild in Northern Thailand, made into cakes and used in Ban Tan to dye cotton yarns a medium and dark blue.

A typical floor loom in Northern Thailand. This one is set up with a trigger shuttle and a "rocking" seat. It's under the house, easily accessed when the weaver has some time to weave.

Women weave when they have time. Some use it as a main source of income when they are not growing and harvesting rice, their staple crop. Others use it to supplement their income. Some tell us they simply love to weave.

This 83-year-old woman is one of the weaving group's original members.

 

This is the second year that this group has received the Green Products certification from the Department of Environmental Quality Promotion, given to small textile producers.

Alleson and Mai enjoy getting to know each other in Ban Tan. Mai told us she values being friends with her customers. We share this value and also feel it's important that the weavers enjoy their work. This is "slow fashion" -- creating cloth that takes time, patience, care and love.