Singapore Stories 2020!

What a BUSY time 2020 has been for me at Su by Hand!

Homecoming could not have been better than having Su by Hand selected as one of the semi-finalist brands in the iconic Singapore Stories design competition!

Currently working hard behind the scenes on a few exciting projects including the creation of a special capsule collection that will be launched jointly with Design Orchard’s new e-commerce plaform OneOrchard

Importantly, I believe that sustainable fashion NEEDS to be meaningful by moving beyond fashion to engage with the community, especially craftsmen. To that effect, I am happy to have reconnected with the Miao ethnic minority family Long (incredibly, many families share the same surname in this tiny mountain community) that we visited in remote Guizhou, China back in July 2019! The wonders of technology (WeChat) has meant that the insane idea of commissioning an embroidery piece with Mrs Wang Mei in remote Guizhou has become a reality! More pictures of the making to come :) Here’s a sneak peek of a quick sketch based on a Miao tin embroidered scarf.

Sometimes, it does take a stroke of madness, and a sparkle of inspiration, to realise truly amazing ideas :)

Adieu 2019, Roots and Home in 2020!

Today is the LAST day of 2019, and what a year this has been!

From the 2 pop-ups we did @designercollectivebymah and @zerrin_lounge to bring what started as a homegrown passion project to the world, to my own relocation back Singapore after more than a decade abroad, 2019 has been inspiring, monumental, scary and exciting all at once!

2020 looks set to be a year of rediscovering the home I left behind, as we embrace our roots in building a deeper, more sustainable future ahead.

HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone!

Guizhou - Miao tin embroidery (锡 绣)

It’s taken me almost 2 months to write this.

But when something is a passion project, it’s always there at the back of one’s mind. In mid May this year, I jumped at the opportunity to join my friend Sharon on her field trip to research the technique of tin embroidery (锡 绣)), unique to the Miao ethnic minority in Guizhou, China. Sharon has an informative article on the technique here: https://www.thetextileatlas.com/craft-stories/miao-tin-gimp-embroidery-china

It had been almost 8 years, maybe more (I lost track) since my last trip there, also on a textiles voyage. Back then, I was a young designer new to China, working for an incredibly exciting (and on hindsight, truly unique) art-fashion Chinese label. Back then, Exception was still a designer’s designer brand, famous amongst art and fashion insiders, unknown to most. Exception de Mixmind, a brand that was more art than fashion, more dream than reality. My love affair with craft goes a long way back…

Zhanliu village. Such an idyllic view

The making of these indigo-dyed fabrics is a long process. In order to give them a black-ish purplish hue, the indigo fabrics are soaked additionally in concoctions of buffalo skin or herbs and beaten to give them a lustrous sheen. In the words of a Miao villager, ‘the blacker the fabric, the better’.

The ladies on their impromptu embroidery gatherings, between meals and off farming duties.

LEFT: Anchoring stitches by Wang Dao Hua (or Yang Chun Hua) These stitches are done via counting threads (the warp & weft of the base fabric), no marking is made! Free-hand….I was gobsmacked.

RIGHT: The thread used for the embroidery comes from unpicking an existing piece of fabric.

Incedibly, the beautiful black anchoring stiches from the earlier picture will then be made almost invisible by dyeing the fabric in indigo. Slivers of tin strips are then cut and woven by hand into these anchoring stitches, so the embroidery is visible only on the right side of the fabric.

Embroidery sampler pieces that are handed down from mothers to daughters as a guide

Without running the risk of romanticising the whole experience given how our social media feeds these days are flooded with images of seemingly happy artisan-villagers in exotic locales making craft, what touched me, was the total absence of commercialisation in the art of tin embroidery here.

The lack of commercialisation is a double-edged sword.

On one hand, the level of execution is kept at a very high standard given how these ladies are making the embroideries for themselves, or their daughters, or their granddaughters, as part of heirloom traditional costumes worn only on special occasions, once or twice a year. It takes them anywhere between a few months to a year or two to complete one set of costume.

On the other hand, given their remoteness up in the mountains, these relatively self-sustained villagers (they farm and build their own houses) have no other means of earning any income from outside sources, without leaving their homes and families for the city.

The embroidery look surprisingly modern, with an understated elegance.

As an outsider, I wished there was more we could do for them, to preserve this art without corrupting it.

Most women in the village above the age of 30 are skilled embroiderers, but this art is almost certainly destined to vanish. Given that embroidery is taught only to daughters who now have access to education and no longer have the time (or in some cases, interest) to learn this incredibly intricate and time-consuming art, it is hard to imagine how the technique can survive.

I was admittedly, a little taken with the chicks and ducks that were incredibly cute and seemed to follow us (or vice versa) everywhere!

Humanity

This week, I’ve been struck with a wave of warm, fuzzy feeling.

Ingrid Dress all packed up with a little sprig of Lamma floral

INGRID dress in silk plisse, hand-dyed in Cutch

The amount of generosity and unexpected support I’ve received since embarking on Su by Hand, has been phenomenal.

THANK YOU to all.

It’s led me to think it really is true that when we do what we love, that is also authentic and meaningful, it resonates with people and we attract good energy from the universe.

From friends who literally sent cash in the post (they are admittedly unconventional types) and entrusted me with her wedding dress, to strangers and friends once close whom I haven’t seen for yeeeears who surprised me with their orders from all corners of the world, to those who collaborated for free, lending their time and skills to imbue each Su by Hand piece with even more beauty and meaning, and friends who actively help spread the word, the list goes on. And we’ve only just started.

I never wanted to create a brand, as I never believed in making more stuff for consumption.

We have enough stuff and enough brands.

What I wanted to do, was really, to spread the idea of clothing as something more akin to craft, something precious that is not bought and thrown away within a few months. To create an emotive connection between ourselves and the clothes that we wear. To raise awareness of craft, the beauty of the handmade and diversity within fashion. To also give back to the consumer, items worthy of its price-tag. The prices for Su by Hand now are high because alot of attention is paid to ensure that each piece is 100% silk and made-to-order with amazing workmanship in a social enterprise where I know how clothes are made.

The next collection will have some ready-made pieces (still very small batch and limited to 5-10 pieces per style) with more accessible price points. I’d also love to get back on my marbling workshops to spread the love of making.

It is not easy for a designer to start a brand. Creating a ‘successful’ (questionable term depending on our definition of what success means) brand has more to do with marketing, promotions and generating hype than it does making beautiful products.

As ironic as it may sound, designers are often like artists. We are so committed to the product with such high expectations on how it should look/feel/mean, that we never get round to showing it out to the world. It is never good enough. We are also neurotic, stubborn individuals who believe in authenticity, that an image (be it on FB, IG and the illusionary world of social media..) exists because it was made by us. The IG accounts of ‘sustainable’ brands is starting to look like the glossy spread of a holiday magazine where a women sits around all day flipping interior deco mags, sipping coffee (or healthy fruit juice) and wearing straw hats.

I’d like to have more authentic images that explain the brand story and process, but it is often not easy (and counter-intuitive to creating) to take pictures when one is actively making things, alone. More work to be done on that one.

Natural dyeing with Cutch (Catechu) and Sandalwood

Natural dyeing is an organic process that is for me 50% scientific formula and 50% practise/intuition given my disinclination towards fastidious note-taking. At some point, you just need to gauge from a practised knowledge of what shades the dye-pot will yield as test-dips of small fabric swatches will always differ from actually dyeing a whole batch of fabric.

The second piece of fabric to be immersed into the dye pot may also yield a lighter shade than the first.

Most dye formulas online only state the amount of dye to use proportinate to WOF (weight of fiber), but rarely the amount of water, which in itself determines the dye concentration.

Ultimately, it is a lot of trial and errors.

Cutch (or catechu) is a great natural dye for beginners to start with as it is so easy to use, and a little goes a long way! I usually weigh mine up in small sachets (that act as filters, to prevent stray bits from spotting an otherwise even dye) that I dissolve in boiling water before adding it to the dye pot.

BELOW LEFT: SANDALWOOD ; RIGHT: CUTCH (CATECHU)

Sandalwood on the other hand yields a beautiful range of beige/orange hues, but is alot harder to use in the sense that the colour pigment isn’t easily extracted, and quite alot need to be used for mid-darker shades. Sandalwood powder dissolves in alcohol, not water! What I usually do is pack them again into little sachets that I immerse in a solution of alcohol (I use ethanol) and boiling water that somehow seems to aid the process.

Did a whole batch of silk fabrics for a custom order… the very special INGRID wedding dress! Not your usual wedding gown…

BELOW LEFT: from bottom to top, are the colours from undyed->2 mins -> 10mins

Silk eats up colour fast! For light shades, do not immerse in the dye pot for over 10-20 mins max.

I wanted a degrade effect on the dress. On hindsight, I needed to have added alot more cutch in order to get that much darker degrade hue at the tip. But I tried an iron bath instead, which gave the beige hue a darker but also duller, grey overtone. Undecided if I liked that colour…

Can’t wait to update with pics of the finished INGRID dress!

The sustainable fashion dilemma

A huge part of the work behind the soon-to-be-launched (once I get my costing done!) FRAGMENTS MAKE ONE WHOLE collection is over. Or should I say, it has only just begun? Creatively and artistically, the baby steps of Su by Hand as a brand has taken root, and will be evolving, becoming.

Commercially though, it is as good as zero since this begun really, as a result of my passion for craft, textiles and I hesitate to use the word, 'fashion’. Fashion no longer makes sense to me, but meaningful, beautiful clothing does. In not naming this as a SS19 or FW19 or resort or xxx-timeline collection, I hope to embody a sense of a timeless continuity. The clothes we buy, should hopefully be timeless or at least made and designed to last a few seasons, a few years, and in the case of intricately crafted pieces, generations, like beautiful vintage clothing.

It took me years of complex internal struggle as a believer of sustainable ‘fashion’ to even tinkle with the idea of starting a brand, let alone make a collection. Firstly, fashion is a tough business as there is SO MUCH WORK that goes into making clothes to fit the body, not just a one-size-fits-all cup, excuse the comparison. Maintaining it commercially also takes the fun out of creating. Importantly though, the whole idea of sustainability runs counter to starting a brand and making more clothes, more ‘fashion’, given the amount of options already available on the market. But I finally concluded that the ONLY way to strengthen or promote a message, is to have VISIBILITY. And visibility is possible only when one has something to show for it. Given the void in the market for brands that offer artisanal one-offs or limited make-to-order styles with amazing finishing that give consumer real value, Su by Hand seemed probable.

For this collection, only dead-stock fabric was used. But I will not claim sustainability credential for using dead-stock fabric as the truth is, dead-stock fabric isn’t exactly fabric that the mills will discard or incinerate anyway. Some use will always be found for it. So there is a lot of greenwashing behind brands that base their sustainability credentials on that. Dead-stock fabrics is just an amazing solution for small indie brands! We get great qualities at low prices because the yardage left are usually too small for big commercial brands that do not produce 5, 10, or 20 pieces of each style, but rather, hundreds or thousands of pieces per style.

Madam Lan who has almost 70 years of sewing experience hemming the neckline binding of INMA top by hand.

Su by Hand is sustainable only because it is artisanal, with one off and small-batch, make-to-order pieces that emphasise the crafted aspect of the brand. A lot of time is taken to make each piece from hand-dyeing the textiles using natural materials (all the roots and barks..), to developing each design first on sketch and then in toiles (making of prototypes) with the studio. Most of the pieces in this collection were made in the production atelier operated by Lok Kwan Social Enterprise. They are old school, they make paper patterns by hand, and have the ability to place and cut each pattern piece around the prints that I make.

There we go, and so the story begins :)

Fragments make one whole

It's been awhile since my last entry. We've had another marbling workshop since then at the Hive, this time with a clothing up-cycling theme. Again it was fully booked! No better way to spend a Saturday afternoon, what with all that warm, happy, creative buzz when you bring a whole bunch of people together, all passionate about textiles craft. Pictorial documentation of our happy day here!

I've been working on a small personal collection of limited one-offs.

'Fragments make one whole' is the theme for this collection, inspired by a quote from Anais Nin. 

"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic."

Somehow, that really struck a chord. The process is fragmented, like our experiences in life, but the teaching and final coming together, is illuminative. The way I envisage the collection is a patchwork of disparate, handcrafted elements, all coming together in their slightly fragmented rough-hewn, slightly imperfect way for a beauty that is ephemeral. 

This will be a capsule collection of classics utilising handcrafted fabrics, with marbling and shibori natural dyeing techniques, with some collaborative haute-couture embroidery! Very excited. The outcome should be precious. A sneak peek here with some pictures of the process...

Accordion-pleated shibori dyeing in madder root

Unravelling the shibori piece, always an exciting (sometimes fearful) moment!

On the marbling tray...

Chiara Vigo and Sea Silk!

It was amazing to meet the charismatic Chiara Vigo, the last lady in the world who still harvests sea silk, in Hong Kong of all places! Thanks to Para Site gallery which flew her in, I had the chance to watch a documentary on her and feel sea silk (also known as byssus) fibres. This incredibly rare and seemingly weightless silk fibre is harvested from the solidified saliva of deep sea clams in the waters surrounding the Sardinian island of Sant'Antioco.

Her practise can best be described as a mixture of an ancient textile tradition and folklore, for much of her textile making process is accompanied by chants combining Sardinian dialect with Hebrew. Historically, byssus yarn was first mentioned on the Rosetta stone and said to have been found in the tombs of pharaohs.

Using a hand spindle, Chiara demonstrated the spinning of byssus fibre into yarn and how soaking it in a special concoction gave it a golden gleam. All shells and impurities need to be extracted from the fibres which must then be desalinated for weeks..before it can be used. And since so little can be harvested each time, it took her 12 years just to make a tie! 

The hand spindle gave me a few ideas...another promising new toy, more possibilities for textile making..

Incredibly (especially when one lives in a highly monetised city such as HK..), byssus yarn is not for sale and Chiara sees herself as carrying on a long line of family tradition tasked with passing on this art for the benefit of humankind. She gave us all a tuff of byssus yarn for keepsake. There is now a crowd-funding drive to raise enough funds for the reopening of her studio/museum!

https://buonacausa.org/cause/chiaravigo

NI EN MORE and natural flower dyeing

I discovered this morning a collective in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico that employs disempowered women to create some very beautiful one-off flower-dyed dresses!

Ni En More  https://www.nienmore.com/home/  which translates to "Not One More" is a slogan created by the poet and activist Susana Chavez Castillo in 1998 to protest against the murders of women in the city of Ciudad Juárez. In 2011 she became one of the victims.

These one-off hand-dyed pieces utilising flower petals have such a poetic, transcendental beauty about them. Inspired to experiment with natural dyeing now, having already hoarded some materials....

Colour Studies

There are some colours that are particularly hard to achieve with the Jacquard Marbling inks that I use. But tangerine, bronze, auburn and ochre are some of the colour stories that have been playing on my mind for awhile now.

Inspired to a large extent by the forest fire on Lamma last summer that turned the green fields golden brown, I wanted to play with these warm hues. Stencil marbling by blocking off parts of the paper was another new experiment.