Ock Pop Tok!

Different stages of the Hmong New Year skirt.

I knew very little about weaving before coming to Laos. I still don’t know how to weave, but at least after our hours-long visit to Ock Pop Tock’s workshop in Luang Prabang, I know how it’s done, and just how complicated the doing is.

In almost every village in Southeast Asia, there are women weaving traditional textiles in dozens of ways. Some use cube-shaped bamboo looms, others use backbrace looms like the one we saw in the Karen village. In many villages, husbands build their wives custom-sized looms, combs, shuttles, and beaters. Brightly patterned cotton and silk scarves are sold at every other market stall in Southeast Asia, and half claim to be handmade. Whether they actually are, or whether the weaver was paid a living wage, are both gnarly questions.

Ms Yi is one of the young artisans inventing new and wildly complicated patterns for her weaving. Every part of the pattern is reflected in the off-white threads attached to the loom; it takes hours to attach.

Ock Pop Tok, which means “East and West” in Lao, sells only hand-crafted products with natural dyes, made by women paid a living wage, which is four times as much as they might be paid from another shop. The fair-trade company also develops relationships with dozens of individual villages all over Laos, and in conjunction with NGO partners, is one of the reasons why textile production lives on in these remote places.

This means that the prices are more akin to those you’d see in the West, but I’d much rather spend more knowing that I wasn’t supporting sweatshop labor in Cambodia. Most entrancingly, the workshop is open to the public, and there are free tours every day. It was one of the best days we spent in the entire country, and I learned a lot. More learning after the cut!

The Tai Deng people believe that if someone shows fear in front of the worms, the silkworms will all die.

The silk spun in the weaving center starts off as the cocoons of wee little mulberry-munching silkworms, one species of which makes both pale yellow or off-white bundles. To make silk thread, the adult worms aren't allowed to emerge from the cocoon, but are instead boiled with thirty of their fellows in a pot, which is stirred with stick. As the filaments loosen from the cocoon, they attach to one another and then the stick. The reeled-off thread is carefully collected to avoid being tangled in the breeze. While in the rest of the world, silk reeling is done by machine, in Laos, the vast majority of it still done by hand. Spun silk must be made by hand; it's spun from the vacated cocoons of another species, which eats everything except mulberry. Yarn is made by teasing the filaments out from the cocoon, with a much more roughspun result.

The dark blue on the left is achieved by fermenting indigo, and then dying it a few dozen times. All of the dyes used at the weaving center are natural, derived from everything from bark to turmeric root to insect wax (which must be worked with alone, because the spirit is shy).

Silk is still silk though, and it's pretty smooth. For the hardiest of the hardy fabrics, we turn to hemp, which is most famously harvested by the Hmong people. Every year, each woman in the tribe will make one skirt for the New Year celebration. Some women will spend as long as five months drawing the batik pattern for the skirt (freehand!), and then the cloth is dyed in an indigo bath up to thirty times to reach the desired depth of blue. Patches of embroidery are where the show off, and then the whole thing is sewn accordian style, meaning that the length of the skirt is four times the finished product. Having put one on myself, I can testify that it is very, very heavy.

No rulers required: Every single stroke on that roll of hemp was made free-hand, by a sexagenarian.

I wanted to leave with an armful of scarves, there are so many different styles and patterns out there unique to each ethnic group. Ethnologists write that Lao textiles can be traced back to specific villages because the design is so representative of that unique culture or family. There are beautiful scarves for sale on their website, though, so if you want a beautiful, handmade product whose every thread is supporting traditional culture and means of livelihood in Laos, you should check them out!

Tai Lu pattern.

Like lightning.

The dizzying choices available.