ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON PC 305

The yarn of this old Palu'e cloth offered a study by itself, as different material was used for different parts, and in odd combination. Let's first look at the ikated parts. Ikated parts were done in machine-made thread, double-ply. We can paraphrase here from the Comment of PC 012: "Remarkably, the ikat work (the 'posh' part) was all done on commercial thread, whereas the plain areas were done in very fine hand-spun. This suggests that on Palu'e at that particular time commercial thread - which allowed very precise ikat - was considered a luxury, something one would not waste on plain sections. As commercial thread already was a commodity in the late colonial period, this cloth should probably be dated earlier in the century."        We do not known when commercial thread became a commodity on Palu'e, but there are reasons to believe that, while very orthodox in their traditions compared to the weavers in Sikka across the straight, paradoxically, Palu'e weavers were also early adopters. We may never know when exactly the mass switch-over to commercial thread was made on Palu'e, but in the late colonial period we already see more machine-made than hand-spun yarn and a rapid influx of Wantex. The striking irregularity of the hand-spun yarn used in the plain bands, with its wild gauge swings, points to quite early manufacture: early 20th or perhaps more likely late 19th c.        Alas, there are few cognates from the same period, because there are few cognates period. Old examples in particular are very scarce, because the 1928 explosion of the vulcanic cone that constitutes Palu'e, caused a tsunami that took away many of the adat houses near the coast - the coast essentially being where one lives on this tiny yet 875 m high island. Plain indigo areas were done in fine cotton handspun. The striking irregularity of the hand-spun yarn used in the plain bands, with its wild gauge swings, points to quite early manufacture: early 20th or, perhaps more likely, late 19th c. Wildly irregular yarn is typical of older ikat, such as the Ende sarong PC 190, the Kisar PC 200 or the Nusa Penida PC 046. Red bands were done in an odd combination - such as we never observed before - of handspun, and double-ply machine-made thread running in parallel. Yellow pinstripes were done quadruple-ply machine-made thread.