Pattern-Making and Textile Technologies across Asia

Abstract To consider textiles along the trade routes that traverse Asia is to consider materials, technologies, images and ideas: fibres and filaments, dyestuffs, and the technologies of felt-making, weaving, embroidery, carpet-weaving and block-printing. Pattern-making is affected by all of these factors. And the trajectories of designs, repeated to form patterns, bring us to confront changes in meaning over time and space, relating textiles to the history of ideas. Within the breadth of this vast complexity of cultural exchange on multiple levels, this paper offers a brief exploration of two vexing problems. The first concerns origins and cultural diffusion of a warp-resist patterning technique ( ikat ). The second concerns the origin, development and transmission of drawloom weaving, resulting in the production of compound textiles with repeat patterns from selvedge to selvedge. These overarching questions relate aspects of pattern-making integral to two textile technologies with a view towards stimulating future research.