Kolose is the Tuvaluan word for crochet, borrowed from the English and then made into something else entirely. The ground is a fine openwork mesh in undyed white mercerised cotton. Into that mesh go motifs in the brightest colours the maker can get — pink, yellow, red, sky blue, green, purple — set side by side at full strength with nothing blended between them.

The holes are not absence. A tiputa is worn to church over a coloured dress, so the open mesh reads as whatever is behind it. Fill the holes and the pattern is gone. Everything is worked in the round from a centre ring, counted by hand, and slightly oval because hands are.