A band from Sumatra

My friend Sarah Auker gave me this band. Click on the photo for a full size view. It was purchased originally by Martha Banyas (owner of Apa Ini? here in Portland) in 1996 in Balige, a town on the southern shoreline of Lake Toba, Sumatra. A label with the band when I received it read "traditional card-woven belt with old, original Toba Sumatra motifs".

I asked Sandra Niessen, a member of WARP (Weave a Real Peace), to have a look at this photo -- Sandra has worked with Indonesian textiles as an anthropologist for over 15 years. Sandra sent me an article she had written for the Dutch magazine Handwerken zonder grenzen,titled "Sirat", March 1985. In this article, she describes the traditional way such textiles are made. "Sirat" is a narrow border in which yarns of different colors are twined around the fringes of cloth. Two strands of weft yarn are tensioned by being wrapped around the right big toe, and a tool called a "dopir" is used to twine the yarns around the fringe. A description in English can be found in To Speak with Cloth: Studies in Indonesian Textiles (Mattiebelle Gittinger, Editor, Museum of Cultural History, UCLA, 1989), at the end of the article "Batak Bags in Weft Twining" by Rita Bolland, on page 223.

At this time, we don't know how the separate band was made. It might have been tablet-woven, though another possibility that has been suggested is a pick-up technique using reserved sheds. The structure is two-strand warp-twining with floats. The floats are almost always over two picks. The band is loosely-woven cotton. Weft is black, the same as warp, doubled. The size of the weaving is 3" x 42" plus fringe.

Peter Collingwood analyzed this photo and determined how to weave the structure with tablets. From this information, I wove a technical reproduction.