Field Journal
The aubergine took three baths, and the third was the one that held
On overdyeing indigo with lac, why a sinh hem is read from the bottom up, and the eleven days I spent unlearning the shuttle in Ban Nong Bua.
The dye master did not call it purple. She called it the colour the indigo becomes when it is no longer afraid of the red, and she said this while lifting a skein of silk out of the lac bath with two bamboo sticks, the thread steaming in the cool of the morning. I had come expecting a recipe. What I got was eleven days of being told to wait.
You build the hem before you build the field
The sinh is woven in tiers, and the dense supplementary-weft band at the hem is set first, because it carries the most thread and decides the weight of everything above it. The plain aubergine field comes later, almost as a rest.