A fala is sun-dried pandanus plaited on the diagonal, so tightly that the finished mat reads as a graded honey field instead of a printed pattern. The body is worked lau kie; the border and motifs are darker lau hulu. That two-fibre split is the entire structure — remove the border band and nothing is left.

Every mark here is counted, not drawn. Motifs step along strand crossings, so they are always diagonal and never curved. Tone shifts across a field the way sun-curing shifts across a real mat, and the surface carries sheen along the strand direction rather than a flat fill.