In Shan villages nearly every house has a loom, made sometimes of bambu, sometimes of heavy wood, and generally kept on the ground in the open space beneath the living rooms.
The raw cotton is prepared by drying the balls in the sun, extracting the seeds by passing them through the usual small two-roller gin, and then opening it out by catching the partly cleaned cotton up from the revolving basket in which it is placed, by means of an instrument shaped like the bow of a violincello (Fig. 4a, p. 5). After the cotton fibres have been separated in this way, they are made into slivers and wound round a stick about eight inches long and three-quarters of an inch thick, from which the cotton is converted into thread by a form of spinning jenny. The thread is wound into hanks, soaked in rice water to give it firmness, and placed in the sun again to dry.
The natural comb on the inside of the fruit called "Satthwabin," which, when dry, is somewhat like a sponge, is used to make the threads more even before being wound on bobbins. The web is next warped by winding the skein off two hand-reels round four short posts fixed firmly in the ground, from twenty to thirty feet apart, according to the length of stuff to be woven (Fig. 4b). When sufficient has been wound the web is lifted off, carried to the loom and beamed. The arrangement of the warp is similar to that described as in use in Syria in Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms[1] except that it is tied to a beam instead of being weighted.[2]
The cloths are narrow, seldom exceeding fifteen inches (38 cm.) in breadth and often being narrower. In many of the heavier ones the effect of a poplin or repp weave is produced by having about three times as many warp threads to the inch than there are weft. This results in the warp forming the surface of the cloth and, of course, minimises the amount of labour.
A Shan woman can weave about five yards of this plain cloth in a day and, unless there is to be a design, the yarn is not dyed but the complete cloth is soaked in an infusion of the indigo.plant, dried, washed and steeped again until the result is sufficiently dark in colour.
Pattern Weaving and the Materials Used.
The weaving of patterns, of which there are an endless number, is performed by passing several shuttles with threads of different colours at intervals along the web. This is a form of "brocade or inlay weaving," and it is probable that, like the cotton plant, it was introduced from India, where even the elaborate patterns of Cashmere shawls were produced by this method, from four to fifteen hundred needles taking the place of the shuttles. In brocade weaving each separate piece of design has its own shuttle which is worked backwards and forwards to the shape of the ornament between the picks of the plain weft. In order to obtain the best effect, the brocading weft is usually passed only under one or two warp threads and over a much larger number, varying according to the patterns, GS 21. The number of ordinary picks between each line of brocading also varies, thus throughout GS 21 (Fig. 21) there are two picks between, whilst in GS 15 the number varies from one to four and thus directly influences the width of the pattern (Fig. 20).
Such a process requires great care and skill on the part of the person weaving, and a space of several minutes sometimes elapses while the numbers of little shuttles [or bobbins] are passed along the breadth of the web.
Dyed spun silks, both twisted and non-twisted (floss) are used in working the patterns on the Shan cloths, but dyed cotton is chiefly used by the Kachins for the same purpose, with a resulting dullness ot colour.
In the patterns on some of the Kachin bags and for the stripes on GS 55n, a fine, silvery, natural, non-spun grass fibre has been used with good effect. On the
