Back to Louang Prabang, now that we’ve seen a good bunch of Wats (temples), now that we’ve spent hours meditating in front of the rivers, what can we do?

Walk around ?

Hey, we haven’t been to Ock Pop Tok yet, let’s go and see how Lao people get their fabrics done !

Honestly, the guided tour sounds much more like a permanent advertising for their shop, restaurant and guesthouse than a promotion of Lao artwork. However, you can still learn quite interesting things. Like, have you ever seen a silk worm?

Have you ever touched row silk? What would you expect, a soft string?

Row silk feels exactly like row wool. Hard to believe that’s what you use to make some of the nicest fabrics in the world… but once you’ve boiled your silk, here you are, you can feel the soft string under your fingers!

Now, have you ever seen someone handcrafting a fabric, do you know how it works? More precisely, do you know how they manage to create those wonderful patterns?

Here, they design a pattern and create a sort of sketch of the pattern with white strings. This pattern will be set vertically, in front of the worker, across the strings that will be used for the fabric. Those strings are parted in two sets (one string every two strings), the worker puts a string across those two sets and then adds the pattern she (mostly, it’s a she) sees in front of her. Then with one pedal, she switches the 2 sets of strings and with the other she pulls up one line from the sketch.

Hum… no so easy to describe with just words such a long process of creation. So if you didn’t get it from my explanation, just trust me: those women do an amazing work!

And here, we saw them in a sort of ‘museum’ but you can see them all along the roads of the villages, working in the shade below their houses (their houses are elevated, thus the shade below) or just in the shade of a simple roof.