Shiny tuk tuk for touring!
L&R&A & I did a short tour in Vientiane with TukTuk Safari, a relatively new company which aims to give visitors less-common experiences of Laos, from the comfort of a well sprung tuk tuk. We chose to focus on Lao textiles. Our day began with an excellent coffee, always welcome and sadly also a less-common experience when travelling.
Our first textile stop was at a local studio: two men dyed
skeins of yarn for in-house and custom orders using non-chemical dyes. They were expert at adding “just a drop more”
of dye to their vats, tweaking the colour and comparing test-strands of yarn to
their samples before rapidly dumping in a number of skeins, swirling them in
the dye-pot for a number of minutes, then rinsing them off and preparing them
for drying.
Dyeing area
Older women wound the dyed skeins off onto shuttles for a
group of younger women, and a few men, to weave. Some of the weaving looked very simple (but
nonetheless elegant!) while at other looms very complex designs were taking shape. The weavers mainly produced scarves and
shawls, and also other rectangular fabrics for home consumption (tablecloths,
table runners, cushions, etc).
Dyed skeins drying
Yarn being wound onto shuttles
Our next stop was the Textile Museum, a privately-run
combination of indigo dyeing workshop, weaving studio, shop and the museum,
which contained interesting examples of different ethnic groups’ weaving (there
are at least 49 different ethnic groups in Laos and they have distinctive
cultures, including different weaving designs), tools, furniture and bric a
brac. The various activities are run
from a family property which is not very far (<10km) from the busy Mekong
river area but which feels out of town: it’s a peaceful collection of buildings
in spacious grounds with the traffic a distant murmur in the background.
At the museum L tried her hand at weaving Lao style and we
looked over the exhibits before being shown the indigo-dyeing process (which is
surprisingly smelly. It didn’t have the
noxious smell of chemical processes, but the vats did smell like something
organic had been sitting there for a while).
We finished our visit with a cup of indigo tea: it comes as
a beautiful aqua colour but after lime juice is added it goes a lovely deep
purple. Very strange! It tastes pleasantly, faintly floral.
Aqua tea + lime juice --> purple tea!
After lunch our final visit was to the VivNcaug (Sisterhood
for Development) cooperative which aims to support women from the Hmong ethnic
group. Hmong have, in recent years, been
one of the more marginalised ethnic groups: they sided with the Americans,
royalists and French (getting not one of those picks correct: not the sort of
people you want to pick your lotto numbers) during the second half of the C20th
and have suffered since 1975. Hmong
communities traditionally live in the north of Laos and young women in Vientiane
(for study and/or work) are vulnerable.
VivNcaug supports women to become financially independent and provides a
community network for people living away from their relatives and friends. It is partially financed (and aiming for self
sufficiency) through the production and sale of high quality Hmong-style textiles
made by cooperative members.
A sample of resist-dyed Hmong fabric (left) and my attempt (right) at wax painting
After a short introduction to the cooperative we tried our
hand at Hmong-style cross stitch and painting with wax on
cloth, which is used to make resist-dyed batik style fabrics. We then
had an opportunity to try on traditional Hmong clothing – there are a lot of
layers, suitable for living in the chilly mountains. The highlight of our visit was learning how
to play Hmong games, in particular top-spinning and an intricately nuanced ball-throwing
game which used to be part of traditional courtship rituals.
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