Weaving through the rice fields (24 images)

  • Naw Ghray (Mrs Nice) from Kloh Taw village, Umphang Province, Thailand, in a fifty-year-old hand woven tunic and sarong. Naw Ghray's husband brought the threads back from Mae Sot, the nearest town, which was a five-day elephant ride through the forested mountains of Western Thailand.

  • In Hti Meh Koh La (Looking glass) village, Pai District, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand, women use seeds from the Kam Set or Bixa orellana seed pod to produce an intense orangey-yellow cotton dye.

  • Detail from an ethnic Karen shoulder bag with a frog drum and horns design. This particular arrangement of horns and drum is a design that is seen on civic and private buildings throughout government-controlled Karen areas of Burma and is worn on clothes extensively. It differs from the frog drum and rising sun design of the Karen National Union flag used in areas controlled by the Karen National Union, a liberation group with its own army that has been fighting for its own state for half a century.

  • Ethnic Karen baskets from Kloh Taw village, Umphang District, Tak Province, Thailand. Handwoven baskets like these are traditionally used to store clothes in.

  • Detail from an ethnic Karen woman's hand woven tunic embroidered with commercially dyed red, yellow and black cotton, undyed white cotton and job's tears seeds. The origin of the top is unknown, but is believed to have been made in Chiang Mai province, Thailand.

  • A factory worker threads a mechanical loom at a weaving factory that specialises in making traditional Karen clothes in Eindu village, Karen State, Burma/Myanmar

  • Ceremonial front opening man's tunic embroidered for Pu Montay, a priest of the Leh Kay religious group from Koh Toh Baw village, Hlaing Bwe township, Pa-an District, Karen State, Burma/Myanmar..Woven with commercially spun white cotton thread, the tunic is embroidered with sayings and words from the Leh Kay script and language. Embroidery includes: "Paweah Wesa (the Leh Kay name for God on the left front shoulder, Kaw Htoo Lei (Karen Country) across the right front shoulder, the Leh Kay name for a sunflower, which also means Saturday - traditionally their holy day - across the left waist and "God created the world" across the right waist and "Pwakenyaw is the older brother" referring to an common myth about Karen origins across the bottom front.

  • Detail of Karen theinyat (ikat dyeing and weaving). This theinyat (ikat) pattern is known as the "they taw" (prawn) design and was particular to Sher Poh Day (Crab Claws Village) Lu Thaw Township, Northern Karen State, Burma/Myanmar. Women in the village dyed their ikat according to this pattern to indicate either where they were born or where they lived.

  • Naw Mu Dah, an ethnic Karen woman from Burma, who is currently living in Mae La Refugee camp in Thailand, with her grandfather's hand dyed pink tunic and mother's red sarong. She says: "I don't know my grandmother's name, but she made this tunic for her husband, my grandfather, Pu Day, in our village Ploh Kay Koh, Hlaingbwe Township, Pa-an District, Karen State, Burma. It is hand dyed, hand spun and hand woven and he wore it for the annual wrist-tying ceremony in August and divination ceremonies throughout the year - where he interpreted chicken bones, made predictions and tried to solve the villagers' problems." During the wrist-tying ceremony, villagers would bring out their best clothes and we unmarried girls wore long white tunics right down to our ankles. If any of us had grown out of our tunics and mistakenly revealed our ankles, the elders accused us of being loose. I was always worried about the length of my tunic in those days. My mother was born in 1930 and she made this sarong in the 1940s when she was a teenager. She remembers the time well, because it was during the Second-World-War, and when she was tending rice in the fields, war planes flew regularly overhead."

  • Pu Ther Ki is a self-styled god-king of the Karen people in Karen State, Burma/Myanmar where he leads a band of followers in a synchretic religion that is neither Buddhist nor Christian, but a mixture of both. Here he is re-interpreting a very traditional Karen ceremony at the foot of Mount Zwegabin, Pa-an, wearing ceremonial clothes with a design based on the diamond pattern of the python skin. While similar to the Buddhist triple robe, the ones Pu Ther Ki wears are quite unique and designed for him in a variety of colours.

  • Bamboo and string pattern rods in a mechanical loom in Northern Thailand. Pattern rods contain loops to lift the thread and are stacked in order in the loom and lifted up into place to separate warp threads in a certain configuration so the weft thread can be pulled by hand through the middle. Then the pattern rod is lifted down and the following one lifted into place. Each rod contains a single section of the pattern, the more complex the pattern, the more pattern rods are required.

  • A Karen woman adjusts a pattern rod to lift the warp threads on a mechanical loom at a weaving centre in Sop Moei district, Mae Seriang Province, Thailand

  • Detail from an embroidered ethnic Karen woman's tunic from a collection held by the Karen Culture and Literature Society in Rangoon/Yangon, Burma/Myanmar. This embroidered tunic is made from commercially woven thin cotton with horizontal, hand-appliqued red cotton strips interspersed with horizontal and symmetrical, elaborately hand-embroidered strips of white, yellow, red, turquoise and green. The top was donated to the Karen Culture and Literature Society, and its origins are unknown, although the thinness of the material and the fact it is embroidered, rather than woven all point to it being made and worn in a lowland, southern, urban area such as Rangoon/Yangon, where the climate is always hot, where few women weave and where good quality thin imported cotton from India was more readily available.

  • Two boy actors, one in a Karen headscarf and tunic, the other in a karen sarong sit backstage waiting for their turn in a Karen Pwe(a music, dance and drama performance) in Pa-an, Karen State, Burma/Myanmar

  • A ethnic Karen woman wearing a hand-embroidered tunic with traditional-style jewellery from a village just a few miles south of Mae Seriang, Mae Hong Son Province, Thailand. Pi Chain Duay (Granny Helpful) is sitting in the doorway of her house in a village south of Mae Seriang, Mae Hong Son Province, Thailand. The tunic she is wearing is typical woven and worn by Pwo Karen women in the area and the woven section over the shoulders is so detailed and complex that women have to weave it threading multiple short pieces of cotton through the weaving using their fingers.

  • Cotton threads hand-dyed using natural ingredients are hung in the sunshine to dry in northern Thailand. The threads have been hand-dyed using natural ingredients, such as bark, roots, leaves and seed pods. The ingredients used are (from left to right) mango leaves, the bark of the 'peu' tree and iron powder, the bark of the 'ghri' tree and lime, the bark of the 'peu' tree and alum and mango leaves mixed with copper powder.

  • An ethnic Karen woman from Hlaingbwe, Burma/Myanmar, now living in Maela refugee camp, Thailand wearing her grandmothers hand-dyed, woven tunic. Thrty-one-year-old Ber Ber, is wearing the top her grandmother Mu Paw made for her wedding in Noh Nay village, Hlaing Bwe, township, Pa-an District, Karen State, Burma. She said: "Trying to work out when my grandmother made her wedding tunic is not easy. I don't know when she was born, when she got married, or even when she died and how old she was when she died. We never kept these dates. But I do know my mother is 57. She was my grandmother's youngest child. My grandparents had six children, each born two years apart. So they probably got married around 1940." The tunic is hand dyed with indigo and a commercially dyed pink thread. The distinctive diamond shaped design is a common motif called the 'naga' stitch, resembling the diamond pattern of a python skin. Known as the 'naga' stitch it recalls the fable of the migrant worker Saw Koh Law Lay who left his village searching for work, and his wife Naw Mu Aye who stayed at home and was captured by a python who forced her to incorporate a diamond-shaped design in her weaving. A cuckoo alerted Saw Koh Law Lay that his wife was in danger, and he returned home and secured her release in return for a drop of blood from his finger.

  • Two ethnic Karen women prepare threads for theinyat (ikat) dyeing in Doi Saket, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand. Theinyat (ikat) style clothes have a two-colour pattern in the weave. To achieve this, small sections of unwoven threads are tightly bound together to prevent dye from entering the bound sections. The threads are then dipped in dye and subsequently woven, where the pattern emerges. There are many different theinyat patterns and how many or few threads are tied together depends on the pattern. The process is laborious, threads need to be measured out according to the woven width of the clothes and the pattern needs to be measured out to ensure the undyed sections all match. A minimum of two women are needed to measure out and tie up the threads, and in the few villages that still dye and weave theinyat, women tend to do it together during the winter (dry) season when the rice has been harvested and wet threads can dry in the sun.

  • Thera (Teacher) Sunday Htoo wearing a full length tunic given to him by friends from La Ther Noh village, Hlaing Bwe Township, Karen (Kayin) State, Eastern Burma. The full length dress is almost identical to another full length dress from La Ther Noh which is owned by sisters Naw Ma Nee Kya, 55 and Naw Mu Pu, 53, who said: "We never knew our great, great, great grandmother's name. But our grandparents told us she wove this tunic and a sarong for her wedding to Eh Noe, our great, great, great, grandfather, 170 years ago (1838) in La Ther Noh village where they both lived. They wore them first for their wedding and afterwards, for the annual animist string tying ceremony every August. She dyed the cotton thread with the bark of the thay waw ghaw tree. In those days, only young unmarried women or ageing spinsters were permitted to collect this tree's bark as according to animist beliefs at the time, the community risked great misfortune if an adulterous woman gathered it"

  • A Karen clothing company calendar at a building site in Pa-an, Karen State, Burma. Calendars still play an important role in Burma where television ownership is still scarce and electricity is infrequent and they can be seen on the bamboo walls of houses in the remotest villages. Clothing companies, political parties and religious organisations all produce calendars, frequently illustrating them with models in traditional dress posed against idealised, pastoral backgrounds.

  • Cotton threads being removed from a bowl of natural dye, Doi Saket, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand. These cotton threads have been dyed with Peu bark and iron powder and when rinsed and dried will make a rich, deep brown. Dye recipes change from village to village, in some villages this colour was acheived by using a dye made of dark mud and buffalo excrement. Instead of dipping it in water, women would heap mud and excement over the cotton threads, stamp them into the mixture and bury it for a few days so it could acheive the intense dark colour.

  • Coin necklace belonging to an ethnic Karen woman in Kloh Taw village, Umphang District, Tak Province, Thailand. Until recently hill Karens preferred to use out-of-tender British empire-issued rupee coins rather than the Burmese kyat or the Thai Baht. Village silversmiths frequently melted them down into necklaces, bracelets and rings and girls from well-off families were often given a necklace of coins as an inheritance. One rupee coins issued during the reign of Edward VII (between 1903 and 1910) were the most popular as they contained the highest silver content.

  • Detail from a Pwo Karen woman's hand woven tunic made with hand dyed indigo, commercially-dyed pink thread and a dense pattern of ger bay pler (Job's tears) seeds.

  • A Karen back strap loom at a teak and bamboo house in Nohbo village, Tak Province, Thailand. This simple hand loom is attached at one end to a bamboo wall or floor. At the other end a strap fixes the loom to the body round the weaver's back. This type of loom can be rolled up and moved around but is restricted in width to the size of a shoulder bag or a quarter of a tunic, which means many tunics have to be sewn together at the front and back as well as under the arms.