Artsve

Date of Photo: January 17, 2001

Description: The man standing on a bird is a common Tai symbol used in textile motifs. This one appears in the hem of a Tai Thaeng Sin. One also commonly sees a man standing on an elephant. On this sin, the man is the yellow figure with arms and legs outstretched on top of a violet bird. The bird’s tail is stretched to the left of the man, its two feet are represented by triangles on the bottom and the head is tucked in towards the back of the bird.

This sin mi was made of three discrete pieces of fabric that are sewn together : the hem, body and waist. The hem was made with the time-consuming discontinuous supplementary weft   method, also known as the chok method. The weaver uses a stick to insert extra colored threads to make a raised pattern after each horizontal weft is woven. The body of this sin was also made with a time-consuming dying process called ikat. Uncolored silk threads are arranged on the loom frame and areas are blocked from dye with water-resistant thread or bamboo stem. The threads are then taken off the frame and soaked in dye. The blurred edges of color are created by dye seepage. This process is repeated for each color the fibers are dyed. The waist of this sin was the most simplest to make. The striped pattern was created with traditional loom weaving changing colored thread to create the striped pattern.

Author: NA

Equipment: NA A95

All documentation on these pages was collected by the Ethnographic data bank of Laos through the Institute of Cultural Research, Laos P.D.R.