Antique Thai textiles: the Mat Mi technique

April 28, 2010 - PRLog -- In the past natural dyes were used in an over-dye technique.  To achieve seven colors, the three primary colors red, yellow and blue were combined to create green, orange and purple. Finally a total of the three primary colors led to a deep purple-brown.

The design was not drawn on paper but planned in the weaver's head, often using an old textile as reference.  The first sections of yarn were tied to resist the first color and then after dyeing, untied to expose to areas of the yarn that were to receive the next color and sections that were not to receive the dye were tied back.

This process was repeated until every color had been placed into the design.  The yarns were wound onto a stretcher for the tying process and divided into sections of the repeat pattern in a continuous thread.  Finally when all the colors had been placed into the yarns, they were wound onto spools thus breaking the continuous thread. These spools were strung in careful order ready for weaving.

If this order was disarranged, the pattern was lost.  During the weaving process, each thread had to be meticulously aligned to reveal the pattern.  In most of the antique silk pieces the yarns were the size of a hair and would have required great patience in preparation to avoid breaking and losing the pattern.  This mind-tangling process is still being practised today, but with chemical dyes and discharge chemicals which require less careful planning than in the over-dye method used in the past with natural dyes.

The natural dyes used were mainly stick lac for red, indigo for blue and a variety of different resources for yellow including jack-fruit wood, cumin root and a jungle vine called cudriania javenensis.  Stick lac is a resin extracted from various trees by the coccus lacca insect.

It was harvested and boiled in acidic water prepared from various materials such as sour tamarind, red ants' nest of acidic leaves. The yarns were then boiled in the extracted dye to achieve a deep crimson.  For blue, indigo was made into vats from indigofera tinctoria plants in a complex process which required much skill.

The indigo itself was rarely used directly on silk as the strong alkali in the vats attacked the fibers.  Instead it was used over the yellow or red dye which protected the yarns.  The yellow dyes were obtained from a number of materials mentioned above, by boiling the substance to extract the dye and immersing the yarns in the dye liqueur for further boiling.

The preparation of the yarns for one ikat silk fabric took many weeks of work before weaving could begin.  In the case of some antique textiles, a purple and pink were obtained from dye traded from China.  These dyes were made from plant and tin extracts which were commercialized in China before the 20th century.

The majority of the textiles using natural dyes from Isan date to the early 20th century, with the majority of the chemically dyed pieces dating to after the second world war.  The climate in Isan is not favorable to the storage of these delicate items and the chance of damage from insects, mould and dust was very high.  Many people stored their textiles in ceramic jars with insect repelling leaves.  The tradition of giving textiles as a sign of respect was very strong in Isan and this led to collections of precious textiles which were never worn, but woven as a means of saving and exchange.

The silk for making the textiles was the bombyx mori species reared by each weaver in Isan.  This had bright yellow cocoons from which a fine filament was reeled by immersing the cocoons in boiling water.  In the past the outer part of the cocoon was discarded as it was considered too rough for use.  Instead only the inner, finer yarns were used, with the local aesthetics looking at the smallest yarns as an indication of the more skilled weavers.

The yellow hue of the silk was bleached out in the de-gumming process leaving a cream colored yarn.  Today the inner and outer part of the cocoon are mixed to give a rather uneven yarn which would have been considered inferior by traditional aesthetics.

The looms in Isan were standing looms made from wood and often using the house posts as part of the construction.  Weaving was done in the cool area under the raised floor of the traditional Isan houses.  The loom used by the Cambodian groups was different to the Lao groups, using a warp beam for winding the warp and stretching it in front of the loom on short ground posts or to the house posts.

The Lao looms required the warp to be wrapped around a beam at the front of the loom and tied above the head of the weaver.

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Reinhart Frais of Asian Textile Art (http://www.asiantextileart.com/) has copyright to many essays relating to rare, antique Indian and Southeast Asian textiles.