Finished objects

Guess who has a finished object!

This is Euay Kiang, whose blurred hands were whipping through the discontinuous supplementary weft on this beautiful weaving in my earliest Laos photos.  Look at how complex this is:

It's an excellent example of how the vertical heddle storage is not a pre-programming of the weaving, but merely one tool that has to be used with great skill to make it all come together. She had to know when to change all those colors, and she was never looking at a picture. She may have consulted a woven sample at the beginning, but my the time I saw her, she was doing this all by heart.
That dark, snake-like design is in fact a snake, the Naga, which is one of the most important symbols in Lao weaving. It's a kind of protective deity, and they are seen in front of all the temple gates, and on the roofs of temples as well.

I was passing this temple, and saw a cloud that looked like another Naga!

Okay, and I have an FO as well. Ta-da:

It's more than a little humbling, to display this next to Kiang's FO, but I do owe it to her that it's finished, so there's a connection.  I showed this to her, and she was enthusiastic for me to work on it, so I tied up to her loom and sat there weaving, demonstrating Andean pick-up for the Lao weavers.

When you show a bunch of professional weavers a thing like this, and they ask how long it will take to finish, and you admit that it would probably take about two hours, maximum - there's really no choice but to finish it that day.  So I have the Ock Pop Tok weavers to thank for the completion of this stage of my Andean weaving study. And I'm proud of it, even if it's kindergarten.