Weaving the World

weaving the world

Busman’s Holiday (Defn); a holiday or form of recreation that involves doing the same thing that one does at work.

Our Heritage Officer, Alison, has definitely been on a busman’s holiday this summer, visiting a textile weaving factory in Pollensa, Mallorca, renowned for its traditional Ikat fabrics.

The Ikat from Mallorca is the traditional Mallorquin fabric, which 1000 years ago travelled from the far east to the Mediterranean through the Silk route and then to Mallorca.  It is also known as “Roba de llengües”, referring to the geometric tongue-like motifs that are so characteristic.

The raw materials of the fabric are cotton and linen.  Cotton for the warp and raw linen for the weft.  The cotton destined to be the warp  is placed on the creel so that all the yarns pass through the warping machine, where they are grouped and ready to prepare the reserves.

The reserves are the areas of the yarns covered with pieces of plastic (in this case recycled bicycle inner tubes!), tightly knotted so that during dyeing, the dye does not penetrate inside. In this way the characteristic drawings that form arrows or combine several tones are obtained, and the handmade process produces a slightly irregular and blurred dyeing at the edges, making each piece of fabric unique.  The spacing of the reserves varies according to the specific design being woven.    The bundled fibres are then dyed in a large stainless steel baths, raised and lowered using a hoist.

After dyeing, the reserve plastics are removed and the cotton bundles are dried in the attic space of the factory in Pollensa.  This can take up top 2 weeks given the humidity of Mallorca.

The resulting dried warps are manually placed in the warping machine.  The threads have to be arranged one by one to ensure they are placed correctly, the final fabric will not correspond to the desired pattern.  With the dyed warp threads in place on the loom, the the fabrics are woven using raw linen weft.

A huge array of colours are available.

There are some features unique to Ikat fabrics.

1 – The blurred edges of the motifs; during the dyeing, the dye extends through the threads under the bond, creating the flame/tongue effect. This part of the process being manual, makes each design repeat slightly different and so each length of fabric is unique.

2 – The designs are identical on both sides of the fabric.  Cheaper copies are only patterned on one side and are often printed to look like Ikat.

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