By Anna Valmero
BANGUED, ABRA - Adelaida Lim’s business combines her passion for fine Filipino fabrics and an advocacy to preserve a dying tradition, the Abra loom weaving and embroidery.
The Baguio native shares she first came across the traditional Abra woven cloth while shopping in Baguio’s public market in the 1990s.
It did not occur to her then that she will start a business on Abra fabric because her first visit and talks with Abra women were mostly to create fabric based on colors that she likes and then buy them for her personal collection.
But after seeing how the craft has become a rare art practiced by only a few Abra women, she set out to start a small business to resell the fabrics so that they will continue to weave and preserve an art passed down from generations dating back to the pre-Spanish era.
“It is a tragedy that this form of loom weaving has been slowly dying because Filipinos no longer use or wear the fabric,” says Adelaida, who founded Abra Atbp.
“Since we have been colonized, we have been so Westernized that we patronize imported goods over our local handicrafts here, which I must say are real works of art and is a testament to our culture even before the Spanish came to our shores.”
According to Adelaida, there are three types of Abra weaving namely pinilian, binakol, and kiniri.
All these three are typical weaving techniques of the Ilocos region until the region was divided into separate provinces of Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur and Abra.
“The pinilian is usually a blanket design that depicts fruits such as pineapple and guava as well as men riding a horse, calesa or banca. As you can see, these fruits are one of the main produce in Abra while the calesa and banca show their transportation in the area and their main livelihood, which is fishing. Usually, it only has two colors, the dominant color of green, rustic orange or blue and white for the designs,” describes Adelaida.
As for the binakol, she explains that these are recognized for its uniform geometric patterns often resulting in dizzying optical art designs made to represent the waves of the sea.
Some historical accounts say that earlier Filipinos have also predominantly used the binakol fabric in rituals such as in dresses worn by both men and women because they believe the “op art” patterns protected them from evil spirits.
Tiniri is the third type of Abra fabric design that “makes use of twisted weaving technique” to make the fabric design used in daily clothing of early Filipinos such as tapis (wraparound skirt from women), sash, loincloths, pants, ceremonial dresses and during the Spanish era, it was used for making poncho.
To preserve Abra’s embroidery technique, Adelaida encouraged the weavers to incorporate embroidered designs on the fabrics they now produce.
For example, a tiniri tapis I purchased from the store, upon close inspection, is actually composed of two 30-inches of tiniri fabric joined together using Abra’s unique embroidery designs.
Fabric made from handloom weaving usually has a width of 20 inches or 30 inches depending on the size of the loom so the tapis is really made of two tiniri fabrics.
It took years of hard work and constant encouraging Abra weavers before Adelaida was able to acquire a collection of Abra fabric that she now resells to specialty bazaars and interested local buyers.
During her visits to Abra, she buys the hand-woven fabric from the weavers. “Sometimes they tell me to buy it immediately because they say they have not earned from their harvest yet,” she says.
The return of profit is quite slow from a couple of months to a year but local fashionistas and even international designers are starting to take notice of the Abra fabrics that she sells.
Fabrics at Abra Atbp. can be viewed on a per appointment basis at #2635 Taft Avenue Extension. You can contact them at 8318658 and 8312346.
“To reintroduce the fabrics to the local market, what we tried to do is to make it more contemporary in terms of the use of the fabrics such as in ponchos or chic wraparounds to relive the old tapis which we Filipinos traditionally wore.”
“For the pinilian blankets, we made them larger from what the Abra women usually weave so that they would fit double- or queen-size beds. We also make items such as table napkins with their embroidery design and pillows made of binakol fabric,” she adds.
For now, the weavers use a chemically-dyed thread, which is a mix of cotton and polyester imported from China. While this would allow the Abra fabrics to be machine-washable, they are not as soft as a 100 percent cotton fabric sold in the future; Adelaida says she plans to encourage the Abra weavers to make their own threads from silk and cotton, as they did before.
“They used to spin their own thread from silk and cotton but now they buy the threads abroad and usually they are victimized by the middlemen here aside from the local middlemen who resell their fabrics before na talagang bagsak presyo ang bili sa kanila (who buy the fabrics at very cheap prices).”
“So what I want to do in the future is to enable them to spin and dye the threads they will use for the fabrics, that is my dream for them: to restore the traditional craft of making these Abra fabrics,” she points out.
There is still a ray of hope for Abra’s traditional loom fabric, says Adelaida, as more weavers now supply her store of their handmade fabrics and as the younger generation in Abra re-learn the tradition from their mothers.
“It is important for the country to preserve treasures like this so that we know what we have. And by the craftsmanship, time and patience that they put on making the fabric thread by thread literally, we can regain our sense of pride that these humble Filipino weavers make the fabrics to tell their stories and their life.”
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