Kumejima Pongee A mordanting technique passed down in the "home of pongee" Kumejima island is said to be the home of pongee. It was here that people adopted techniques of silkworm raising from China and the basics of weaving were already in place by the middle of the 17th century. I interviewed Ms Teiko Tobaru, who is carrying on techniques learned from her mother and her grandmother and passing them on to young people. Ms Teiko Tobaru holds a roll of cloth she designed and wove herself. Traditional Kumejima pongee has ikat designs in brown and yellow on a glossy black background. Dyers achieve this distinctive black with a dyeing and mordanting technique that requires at least a month of work. Ms Tobaru gave me an outline of the process. The thread is not colored by the mud. First of all it must be dyed with a vegetable dye such as that obtained from the sharinbai (Raphiolepis umbellata) or sarutori ibara, both members of the rose family. This is repeated about 80 times and the thread must be dried in between dyeing, so the process can last at least 25 days. Once the thread has finally turned brown, it is time for the mordanting in mud. Old ladies from Kumejima get up at 3 a.m. to start the process. They immerse the thread in plastic buckets of mud that they have collected from the mountains and wait for two hours. Then the thread is washed and immersed again. This is repeated seven times in one day. The following day they dye the yarn again in sharinbai then wait two or three days before repeating the mordanting and sharinbai dyeing and so on again. The mud itself is not black but a charcoal gray. However, it dyes black, and this is the result of a chemical reaction between iron in the mud and tannin in the sharinbai juice. The one-month period from the end of October to the end of November is when doro-zome is performed on the island. A year's worth of thread is prepared during this time. Ms Tobaru tells me it is one of those jobs where the whole neighborhood gathers to help out and you will find thread drying in every person's garden. Once she starts weaving she concentrates hard and the work goes quickly. So important is weaving to Kumejima, no matter where you walk in the villages of the island you are likely to hear the clack of the loom. When Ms Tobaru was a child, she always awoke to the sound of her mother weaving. She started helping her mother when she was in junior high school but after leaving high school left to work in Gifu Prefecture for a while. However it was not long before she returned to Okinawa and studied dyeing at a craft school. She has been weaving Kumejima pongee for 24 years since and frequently exhibits her work. "The critical part of the craft is the binding of the thread and the dyeing," explains Ms Tobaru. Binding is the process of tying off parts of the thread to create a resist for ikat weaving. She explains that by the time she has finished binding enough thread for four kimonoes -- which takes 2-4 weeks -- her fingertips are raw. But she does not seem to mind. In fact she says she likes the preparation stage the best. "Then, of course, it's marvelous to see the pattern emerging as you weave. Once I have seen that, I am satisfied and I can give the cloth away without looking back," she laughs. The process of hand-spinning the thread, creating the design, binding the yarn and dyeing it all takes several months, so the actual weaving is like the finishing line of a long race. I can imagine that for a weaver there must be immense joy in seeing your patterns finally take shape. "I have been weaving since I was a kid," says Ms Tobaru, "so I have never found it difficult to learn techniques, but the more I weave the harder it seems to be to make a weave that I am really satisfied with -- it's either not quite the right color or the thread is too thick or something else is wrong." Right now Ms Tobaru is trying to recreate 17th century patterns from a book that the Ryukyu government used to supply to the weaver women of Kumejima, containing patterns for official weaves for tribute cloth. "There were many more colors than we use today," she points out, "and the designs were much more complex. It's very interesting." So excited is she about recreating these weaves that she neglects to consider the hardships involved. She is recreating patterns from the old official pattern book one by one. Profile Teiko Tobaru Born 1954. Her works have been selected for display in the Okinawa Prefectural Crafts Exhibition. She also acts as an instructor of the craft.