Guides · Aftercare
Almost every problem people report with handwoven pieces — cracking, fading, a shape that slowly sags, a grey bloom in a stored corner — comes from the same property that makes the piece possible in the first place. Understand that one thing and the rest of the care is obvious.
The rest of this page is the reasoning, because the reasoning is what lets you answer a customer's question without looking anything up — and because the one rule that people break most often (water) is the same rule that explains why the piece exists at all.
Nothing below is specific to one supplier. These are the properties of dry plant fibre, and they apply to a piece from us, from another workshop in Bobai, or from a maker you found somewhere else entirely.
A bamboo or maize strip is mostly cellulose, and the water inside it is not contamination — it is what makes the material bendable. Water molecules sit between the fibres and let them slide past each other a little. Take that water out and the strip gets stiff, then brittle: bend it and instead of flexing, it fails at the tightest point of the turn.
In a heated room in the middle of winter, or above a radiator, or in the direct line of an air conditioner, that is exactly what happens over weeks rather than days. The piece does not look old. It looks dry, and then one day there is a split along a curve where nothing touched it.
Every piece in this category is woven damp, shaped while damp, and dried into that shape. That is the whole trick: water makes the strip workable, and removing the water locks the shape in. The full sequence is here, and it is worth knowing, because it explains four separate pieces of advice at once:
A radiator, a heated floor, a spot directly under an air outlet. This is the one that produces cracks, and it is almost always diagnosed as a fault in the piece. It usually is not: the piece was made in a humid county in the south of Guangxi, where the material behaves for hours between soaking and weaving, and then sold into a centrally heated room in February.
Two mechanisms at once. Ultraviolet light breaks down the lignin in the fibre, which is the bleaching you see, and the warmth of the sunlit spot drives moisture out faster than the rest of the piece. That is why a piece with one edge towards a window ends up two colours rather than one uniform lighter colour.
Mould needs three things: something to grow on, moisture, and air that is not moving. A woven plant fibre piece is the first one by definition, so you are managing the other two. A bathroom, a kitchen corner, a basement — anywhere damp and unventilated — and a sealed bag or a tightly wrapped pallet are the two ways this usually happens.
Insects are the worry people raise first and the risk worth worrying about least. Dry plant fibre with no starch left in it is not an attractive food source, and a piece that has been properly dried is a poor one. Mould is the realistic risk.
A woven piece holds its shape because it dried, not because it is rigid. Hang a wide one from a single fixing and the weave around that point carries everything, slowly, for as long as it hangs. Stack heavy things on a flat piece and the same thing happens from the other direction. Spread the load: two fixings for anything wide, and nothing stacked on top of a piece that is meant to be seen.
Three levels, and you should rarely need the third.
A soft brush, moved in the direction the strips run. A vacuum cleaner on its lowest setting with a brush attachment also works, but do not put the bare nozzle on the weave: suction pulls at the ends of the strips and can lift one that was tucked in years ago. Dust gathers in the valleys of the weave, so a piece that looks dull rather than dirty usually only needs this.
Wring a clean pale cloth out until it does not drip, wipe the mark with the weave rather than across it, then go over the same place with a dry cloth and leave the piece somewhere with moving air until you are certain it is dry. Not warm-and-fast: even-and-thorough. If the mark is still there, it is probably in the fibre rather than on it, and you stop.
There is no version of washing a woven piece that carries no risk, because the risk is not the dirt, it is the water. If a piece genuinely needs more than dusting and a damp cloth, it is a job for someone who can dry it flat and evenly afterwards, and it is worth asking whether the piece is worth it first.
| Do not | What happens | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Soak it, or leave it in water | It dries into a new shape — usually a slumped one | Water is what made the fibre workable in the first place |
| Use a steam cleaner | Heat and moisture together, unevenly | One face dries before the other, and the stress shows up later as a split |
| Reach for bleach or a strong detergent | Strip colour out unevenly, leave residue in the weave | The colour is the fibre itself, not a coating, so it cannot be cleaned back |
| Oil it, wax it, or spray it | Surface gets tacky, then grey, then hard to clean at all | A film traps dust and stops the fibre exchanging moisture with the room |
| Store it sealed in plastic | A grey bloom appears in the weave | Whatever moisture was in the piece when you closed the bag stays in it |
For a shop rather than a home, the practical version is short: flat, nested with a sheet of acid-free tissue between each piece, in a carton that can breathe, off a concrete floor, away from a radiator, and sell the oldest first.
An untreated plant fibre responds to its surroundings. Two pieces from the same batch can be a shade apart before anything happens to them, and six months of light will move both. The first instinct of anyone selling these is to treat that as a fault to be eliminated. It is the opposite: a coating that held one colour forever would be the thing to be suspicious of, and it would come with the problems listed in the table above.
If you sell these, the useful move is to say so first. A customer told in advance that the piece will settle and shift reads it as a natural material. A customer who discovers it reads it as a defect, and the return costs more than the sentence did.
This is the version we would print. Take it, change the wording, put your own name on it — it is not ours, and it is the sort of thing no one in this category bothers to give you.
Nothing in this guide is a warranty, and none of it is specific to us. It is how dry plant fibre behaves, whoever wove it.
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