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100% SILK. 100% ART. Silk squares for quilters 09/22/2008 - By Ellen Agger
Panmai Group staff helps put together silk squares packages for sale in Canada
Take a virtual visit to Northeast Thailand with Ellen Agger and Alleson Kase, as they visit Panmai Group. This women's weaving group creates some of TAMMACHAT Natural Textiles' handwoven, naturally dyed silks, available locally.
This article is from the TAMMACHAT Natural Textiles Travel Blog. In this blog, Ellen Agger and Alleson Kase share some of their travel stories in Thailand and Laos during the winter of 2008-2009. They recount highlights of their visits with women's weaving groups, the source of the beautiful, handwoven textiles that TAMMACHAT Natural Textiles brings to Canada. You can find these textiles in TAMMACHAT's online shop and at local textile events. Visit their website's Events page for details.
Panmai Group - silk art!
Our next visit was to Panmai Group, another women's weaving group in
Isaan (Northeast Thailand) that has been organized for almost 20 years.
Like Prae Pan Group, it was started to help women earn income so they
could stay in their villages, continue traditional work that they
learned from their mothers and grandmothers, and supplement their
income from rice farming.
Panmai has members in villages
spread throughout 3 provinces in Northeast Thailand, close to the
border of Cambodia: Roi Et, Surin and Si Saket. We arrived at their
office tucked away in a small market town of Roi Et province and
settled in for 3 days of work together.
Our goal: to learn what
Panmai needs from us to be able to receive orders from us in Canada,
and to help them build their capacity to handle international orders,
such as ours, by learning how to ship to Canada. (Each country has its
own requirements and we are their first Canadian wholesale customer.)
Our training included how to fill in the appropriate forms needed by
Canadian postal and customs authorities. We did this training, amidst
much laughter and language exchanges, with the help of a new staff
person who has been hired to work with international customers. At the
same time, they taught us how to order in ways that make it most
beneficial to the group: we learned the minimum and maximum numbers of
scarves to order, for example, which will allow a weaver to most
efficiently "warp" the loom (i.e., string the lengthwise threads onto
the loom) so that she might make the ideal number of pieces.
We
also learned more about the group and its work. We knew they were
respected, even renowned, for both their subtle and dynamic natural
dyeing of silk, but we also learned that:
all the silk they use is
hand-reeled in member villages (or in other villages in Surin province
if Panmai members cannot produce enough at a particular time)
- all
mulberry leaves fed to the silkworms are organic and all natural dye
materials are organic, so all the Panmai silk is 100% organic!
- members (250 at present) weave 11 months of the year, but are unable to
continue the work during the heaviest of the rainy season months
- about 100 members weave in silk and about 50 members raise silkworms
and hand-reel the silk, a process called sericulture; they are hoping
to expand their capacity to do sericulture in future
- an annual dividend is paid to all members
Most exciting was a new product that we developed with the help of staff and members of Panmai: silk squares for art quilters!
With
their help and artistic advice, we developed an attractive package of
silk squares in 4 colour combinations, each package containing 4 solid
colours and 1 mutmii square (mutmii is a traditional technique
involving tie-dying thread to create a beautiful pattern that appears
during weaving). We hope that this new product -- which we call
"100% SILK. 100% ART." -- will be perfect for art quilters who want to
incorporate these unique, hand-reeled, naturally dyed, handwoven pieces
of silk into their quilts.
Because quilting is not a
traditional form of handwork in this part of Thailand, we initially had
some trouble explaining what the squares were for. Following the adage
that a "picture is worth a thousand words," we went online and
introduced the staff to the work of 2 internationally known quilters
from our area in Nova Scotia, Canada -- Laurie Swim and Valerie
Hearder. The Thai staff members were fascinated by the quilts that we
showed them, which we described as "painting with silk," as this was a
new art form that they had never seen before.
We plan to
return next year with reports on how these pieces of 'silk art' were
received by art quilters in Canada, after their debut this June at the
2008 Quilt Canada conference to be held in St. John's, Newfoundland. [Note: The silk squares were a hit in St. John's! We sold out of several of the palettes we created with Panmi.]
Although
Panmai also creates beautiful handwoven cottons, our visit with them
was a silk extravaganza! Our time together ended with the packing of
several boxes of silk squares, scarves, shawls and fabric in the
gray-blues of a flower called anchan, magentas and pinks from krang (an insect resin), greens from (lemongrass), oranges and golds from the wood of kanoon (jack fruit trees) and more.
It was an enriching visit for all of us, and we hope that introducing their art to Canada will be as well!
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