#6: Pa Da Cotton Textile Museum

Dec. 12, 2009

En route to visit Mai in Ban Tan in the North of Thailand, we stop at the Pa Da Cotton Textile Museum in Baan Rai Pai Ngarm, 70 km south of Chiang Mai. We turn off the highway into a straight gravel lane that's lined on either side with towering bamboo. Ahead, in the sunlight that filters through the dense clumps, slivers of dry leaves drift towards earth like a strange fall of snowflakes inside a green cathedral. I stop the bike so that Ellen can dismount and go ahead on foot with her camera at the ready.

Several hundred meters farther on there's a beautiful teak building shaded by large trees and surrounded by mature flowering shrubs. Like many traditionally styled wooden houses in the North, it sits on sturdy posts -- tree trunks really -- about 3 meters tall. This provides room below for a wide range of activities that are protected from the glaring sun of hot season and the heavy downpours of rainy season. Here the space is used as a weaving studio.

Above is the museum, which we visited last year. It's filled with traditional handlooms and other weaving and dyeing equipment, as well as photographs from earlier times. The museum celebrates and preserves the essential traditions of local cotton textile production, including the cultivation of native species of cotton and the use of natural dyes (tree barks, roots, leaves and berries). The museum is also a tribute to its founder, Mrs. Saeng-da Bunsiddhi.

Mrs. Saeng-da was born in 1919. Like most Thai and Lao weavers, she learned the traditional skills of dyeing and weaving from her grandmother. She learned additional techniques from the ethnic minorities who live in the area, an area rich in cotton textile traditions. Like most women of the time, she wove fabrics for her family's use -- including the khaki fabric needed for her husband's uniforms during World War II.

After the war, she began collecting weaving equipment and started growing native cotton plants. Together with other local women, she started the Housewives’ Union to increase income and employment opportunities, to preserve traditional dyeing and weaving techniques and to promote handicraft production. Initially, the women wove outside harvest season (as is often still the case) but the spinning, dyeing and weaving eventually grew to employ 40 of Mrs. Saeng-da's neighbours. Decades later, on the day we visited, we saw only 4 women at spinning wheels and 2 at looms.

We greet Mrs. Saeng-da's elderly daughter, who now runs the centre. As she leads us to the textile shop that sits behind the museum, she shows no sign of remembering us: this is not unexpected, given the number of foreigners who might visit during a year but it is unusual, as most Thais do remember us even if they’ve only met us once.

We place an order for 72 placemats in the same colours and pattern that we purchased last year. The colours -- intense indigo blues, rich greens and deep purples – are stronger than we usually find and the nubbly texture of the handspun cotton adds to their charm. The combination was popular last year and we expect it will be this year too.

We are lucky enough to pick up a few scarves in the same colour palette. All these pieces -- like the museum and weaving centre -- are unique to Baan Rai Pai Ngarm. They are also testaments to the hard work of Mrs. Saeng-da, who in the 1980's was declared a National Folkcraft Artist in Thailand. We're happy to recognize and help preserve these traditional practices through our purchases.

Alleson (Pii Plaa)

[Ellen's note: Thanks to Bhothong Keowsuddhi, Director of the Northern Industrial Promotion Centre, for background information, presented in a brochure distributed at the centre.]

#5: Visiting Mai at Junhom Bantan

Dec 12, 2009

It's a lovely day of driving to visit Junhom Bantan, a social enterprise that works with cotton weavers in 2 small villages 100 kms south of Chiang Mai. Mindful of our carbon footprint, we usually travel by public transit when we can't go by rented motorbike. However, cotton products are bulky as well as heavy (not great on a motorbike) and the village is 20 kms beyond the junction where the bus stops, so we rent a car for the day. This allows us to also stop along the way at the Pa Da Cotton Textile Museum (to be covered in the next blog entry).

Alleson recollects that the turn off the main highway is trickier than it appears on the map and, indeed, it is but we negotiate the further junction and head out the tertiary road through a dry scrub forest and look closely for the side road to the village. The turn-off is several kilometres further than we remember so we make a note for next time. Along this fourth road, stunted fruit trees are interspersed with stands of bamboo. The land is dry and rises gently towards one of the 5 chains of mountains that run north-south through Northern Thailand. It appears not well suited for rice farming despite the harvested fields that we also see.

Four kilometres along, and well past the small corner store where we asked for directions last time, we pull up alongside a wall covered in vines, unsure where to go next. Happily, Mai appears out of a driveway to greet us; we've arrived despite feeling lost!

We met Mai 2 visits ago and we've become more and more fond of each other with each visit. Her mother was one of the original members of the weaving group from which Junhom Bantan has evolved. The group was started 15 years ago with help from the government and the local branch of Homenet, an international organization that works with home-based workers. Mai now co-ordinates the re-conceived social enterprise. She develops new designs, manages finances and production and, most importantly, provides an important link to international markets that the group would otherwise be unable to reach.

Like many Thai women of her generation, Mai was able to go to university, studying marketing; this was a feat for her parents, who, as farmers, struggled to raise enough money to supplement her small scholarship, with help from the income generated by the weaving and dyeing. As many studies have shown, when women, in particular, are able make money beyond a subsistence level, they put it towards their children's nutrition and education. Although she did go to university, and clearly has skills to show for it, Mai tells us that she prefers to live in the village where she grew up -- unlike many of her peers.

During our visit she tells us that her father is a master dyer and that, in Ban Tan and the neighboring village, men do much of the heavy work of dyeing the cotton yarns, while a group of 40 women do the weaving. Our order of 124 pieces in 5 designs will take them 2 months to produce. This is "slow fashion" -- from the time needed for careful, handmade production to the timeless designs and the quality of the work that will help these pieces last.

Mai tells us the same story about the cotton yarns that we've heard from others: She wants to provide more organic cotton products, especially for her international customers, but there is not enough organic cotton grown in Thailand to meet the demand. Last year, she made the decision to invest in 1,000 kg of handspun cotton from a local Karen village, grown without chemicals. (She explained that she doesn't use the term "organic" because of the proximity of heavily sprayed fruit trees near the cotton fields.)

At the same time, most weavers prefer to use factory-produced cotton yarns for the warp (lengthwise yarns on the loom) because they are thinner yet stronger than handspun cotton yarns. This means that they are both easier to thread through the weaving comb as well as less likely to break during weaving. Each type of yarn has its own advantage. Handspun cotton yarns are very likely chemical-free and produce uniquely rich textures while machine spun cotton yarns are ideal for intricate patterns and can result in an especially lovely drape. Both have their place, and as our principal objective is to provide rural women with much-needed income, we purchase both.

All the dyes used by Junhom Bantan are made from locally gathered dye materials: barks are boiled to give soft tans, deeper browns and even yellows; leaves colour the yarns in various shades of green; krang (insect resin) yields pinks, magentas and pale purples; and the leaves of the indigo shrub, through an alchemy all their own, provide a wide range of blues. Some of these dyestuffs are purpose-grown; others grow wild in the district and are gathered sustainably to ensure they will continue to be available to the dyers' pots. (Those of you who have bought our wrap pants in the past have seen some of these beautiful colours, as these pants come from this group.)

I asked Alleson to compare her ability to speak Thai with Mai's ability to speak English. She tells me that they are probably on par, although Alleson is practicing her Thai on a daily basis now, while Mai only has intermittent opportunities to practice. We were quite able to communicate, complimenting their spoken language with drawings and samples put together in small piles. I also photographed several scarves to keep a visual record of our order.

As we left, after spending the afternoon together discussing designs, placing our order, sharing stories about our countries, laughing and eating bananas that Mai brought from her garden, she invited us to stay with her in her village on our next trip. She will introduce us to some of the weavers and dyers, which we always love as this helps us tell their story better.

Also, we'll take the bus next time, as Mai has offered to have us picked up at the junction. We can't wait!

Ellen (Nok Noi)

#4: How we communicate with the weavers

We're often asked if we can recommend our driver and interpreter that we use to visit the weaving groups in Thailand and Laos from whom we buy the naturally dyed silk and cotton textiles we sell in North America. We laugh and sometimes wish it were so easy (although not usually so, as it's much more fun the way we do it).

As we begin our 5th buying trip -- which we always describe also as a networking trip -- I am reflecting on the many ways we communicate with the weaving groups. Rarely have we ever hired someone to interpret who is not also integral to the group with whom we're working. Here's a sampling of ways we communicate with the weaving groups:

1. We rely heavily on Alleson's Thai. Since she lived in Thailand almost 8 years, she can get around quite well, although she feels her vocabulary is slipping each year that she spends 8 months at home in Canada. Still, with some effort, she has added to words to her weaving lexicon: loom, warp, weft, heddle (and other terms she has had to learn first in English!), to name a few. In fact, if she hadn't been able to carry on a conversation in Thai the first time we visited Prae Pan Group in Khon Kaen, where TAMMACHAT Natural Textiles was born, I seriously question if we'd have embarked on this fair trade enterprise in the first place.
2. We also rely on board members of the 2 largest weaving co-ops we work with who speak English, although at times we look at each other and shrug in confusion, because sentence construction in Thai and English is vastly different. Mai pen rai, we end up saying, in Thai -- never mind, it's OK, not to worry! 
3. Staff at a few of the weaving groups (or executive directors of NGOs that work with village groups who do the natural dyeing, weaving and sewing of the products we buy) are, at times, an invaluable resource. We've spent time working with field staff exchanging words and finally coming to common understandings. In Laos, we've more heavily relied on staff of weaving centres (or the daughter of 1 group's founder, who lives in Australia) to help us with orders and provide information.
4. We also bring photographs of products we've bought in the past, draw pictures of products we'd like to design together, occasionally borrow the services of a friend to translate, especially when we need to use the phone -- and we laugh a lot.
   

One way or another, we manage to choose textiles from stock already woven and make orders for new pieces. Often, as you'll read in future blog entries, we're invited to share a meal, take home a bag of bananas or visit the person we've been working with, with a gracious invitation to stay in their home.

A final note: I have been studying Thai at home in Canada via the internet, podcasts and my notebooks from lessons I took 2 trips ago in Chiang Mai. I could not do this work with the language skills I presently have, but being able to compliment -- in Thai -- the women who do this highly skilled work, tell brief stories about life in Canada (especially as it relates to our experiences here) or comment on the food we're sharing goes a long way to building relationships that are a key element of fair trade.

All for now,

Ellen (Nok Noi)