Strokes on the Stone Inspired Pinawetengan Woven Fabric

Helloindonesia.id – For the Minahasa community, Pinawetengan is not just a pile of meaningless stones, this large stone found in the highlands (tonduraken) is the starting point of Minahasa culture. On that big rock, the ancestors of the various sub-ethnic Minahasa vowed to unite, and wrote it on the rock in the form of drawings and strokes.

After being discovered in 1888, the images and strokes on Watu Pinawetengan were then applied to various media as Minahasa characteristics, one of which was on woven fabric media. This is done, of course, to maintain and preserve the noble values ​​contained in the images and strokes of Watu Pinawetengan.

Lili, one of the Pinawetengan woven fabric craftsmen who was met at the North Sulawesi Cultural Center, revealed that the process of making Pinawetengan woven fabrics is carried out in several stages. The first stage to do is by closing the thread, sizing, and making patterns. The pattern that has been made is then closed by tying it with raffia rope.

The pattern formed on the thread becomes a motif that resembles some of the strokes and images in Watu Pinawetengan. These motifs include the Karema, Lumi’muut, and Toar motifs. These three images are representations of the Minahasa ancestors. Uniquely the image was also found in the Angano Cave, Philippines. In addition, there is also the Lingkan Wene motif, which is a motif depicting the goddess of fertility, and the toar motif when she was a baby, a fish motif that indicates a certain season.

After the pattern has been formed on the thread, the thread then enters the coloring stage. The next step is to grind and palletize the yarn. After that, the dyed thread is inserted into the ikat loom to be combined into a beautiful woven fabric.

To produce yarn that has already formed a pattern, woven fabric craftsmen can spend three weeks to one month working on it. Then when entering into the process of unifying the threads on the ikat loom, the craftsmen can produce one meter of woven fabric per day.

In general, there are 4 types of Pinawetengan fabrics, namely polyester, chiffon, silk, and woven fabrics. The difference between the four types of fabric lies in the threads used. The difference in thread is what affects the selling price of the four types of Pinawetengan fabric.

“One base of woven cloth has a length of two and a quarter meters, one meter of woven cloth is usually sold for two hundred thousand. Unlike songket cloth, songket cloth is one meter and one million. Songket cloth is more expensive because it uses silk thread whose raw materials are directly supplied from Bali.” said Lili added.

Songket and weaving lovers usually come directly to the North Sulawesi Cultural Center to get Pinawetengan woven fabrics. Most of them come from the Minahasa region itself, as well as many from outside the region and even from abroad.

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