I know you won’t find my travel pictures boring because they are all about weave. Perhaps the little things I’ve noticed on my trip can be noticed here in Australia too, if I only look about for it. But when you go to a country where textiles count it just seems to mean so much.
Meet Tshering from Experience Bhutan the travel partner of Active Travel. This photo really captures a young commanding man with great integrity and leadership qualities, perhaps inspired by Bhutan’s quest for ‘gross national happiness’.

Here he is standing at the Trongsa Dzong wearing the white kabne. A white cloth wrapped in such a way that it stays on! Something that is a challenge with scarves. The cloth was very long which I think helped the situation.
  
Most men still wear he national dress – the Gho – and they really look fantastic as you can see. Tshering’s Ghos where mainly handwoven with a supplementary warp patterning or striping rather than the weave of the women’s kiras. Many have a striped weave which held little weave secrets up close.
Every day each of the Bhutanese guides/organisers wore different woven ghos. On this day, I originally thought that Tshering’s striped gho was a plain weave. Ho hum. But this wasn’t the case. Of course not. Similar to the tartans of Scotland it is woven in a very fine twill, making the drape and comfort of the garment far better than the drapeless nature of plainweave. The twill is the ‘birds eye’ and Tshering said the pattern had the same name there.

My husband also got into Bhutan’s national dress and you can see the Australian version here too. The short socks and Blundstones look a little wrong – but, who knows, it may take off.

A Tingma is a Bhutanese weft pattern design which uses discontinuous supplementary wefts in addition to a ground weft. This photo illustrates a lovely example this type of weave. Usually woven for the women’s dress (Kira), this is a smaller table runner size. A silk on silk textile, it looks alot like embroidery and the technique for creating it is rather like embroidering around the warp threads as the cloth is woven – row by row.You can also see the back of the cloth with the supplementary weft ends pushed to the back of the cloth and left in their expansive and disarrayed state. The back of the cloth tells me just as much about the weaving and its technique as the front. The back tells me that the supplementary wefts (ie the wefts that weave the fancy coloured patterning) were inserted in an open shed. Only the top threads of the open shed were manipulated to place the supplementary weft across. The front of the cloth tells me how those threads wove in and out to create the pattern.

I’m currently counting, making stories and analyzing these threads. The first most interesting discovery was the ‘locked down’ nature of the lines that sit horizontally on the fabric. Normally horizontal lines of pattern go over a number of ends and are caught by one or two ends at regulated patterned intervals

The ingenuity and tenacity of this textile lies in the use of soumak on a very fine scale to produce the horizontal veins. This locks down the weft and creates more options for design that we may avoid due to the possiblity of floats that may be too long.