How it's made
Almost every difference in price, feel and lifespan between two woven pieces comes from what happened before the weaving started. This page is the whole sequence, in order — and how to check the result yourself.
Stiff and strong, so it holds a shape on its own. It has to be split into strips of a controlled width before it can be woven at all — that step decides how tight the finished weave can be.
Maize here is a coarse sedge, not sweetcorn. It is softer than bamboo and takes a tight, even weave, which is why it is used where the surface matters more than the structure.
Rounded rather than flat, with a faint natural sheen. It makes a chunkier, softer weave and hides small irregularities well — forgiving to look at, harder to finish cleanly.
Bamboo is cut at a particular age. Too young and it shrinks and splits later; too old and it turns brittle and will not bend around a tight curve. The cut also follows the season, because the plant carries more sugar in some months, which attracts insects in a finished piece.
The stem is split into strips by hand, one at a time. A strip's width has to stay even along its whole length — roughly within a millimetre — or the finished surface shows light and dark bands. Machines cut faster but cannot read where the nodes and the grain are, so they waste more and the strips fray at the edge.
Sun-dried for 7 to 15 days, turned regularly. A kiln does it in roughly a day, but the outside dries faster than the inside, which leaves stress in the strip — that stress is what later becomes a crack in a dry room in February. Sun-drying is slower and weather-dependent, and that is exactly why this step cannot be rushed.
Dried material is too brittle to bend. It goes back into water before weaving so it will turn a corner without snapping. The weaver works with it wet and it stiffens as it dries.
Base first, then the body, then the closing row. Density is a choice, not a consequence: an open weave is quick and lets light through, a tight weave takes several times as long and reads as a solid surface.
While still slightly damp, the piece is pressed or shaped so it holds its form. Woven wet, set into shape, dried into that shape — this is why a good piece does not slowly sag on a wall.
The edge is closed, wrapped or bound. This is where quality becomes visible: a locked edge stays tight for years, and a covered-up edge is usually hiding loose ends underneath.
We do not publish our costs, but the mechanics are not a secret, and they explain the price difference between two pieces that look similar in a photograph.
Seven to fifteen days of sun-drying is weather, not labour. Rain extends it. No amount of money makes it faster without changing the material.
Splitting by hand survives because it needs judgement — where the node sits, which way the grain runs. That is the single step most responsible for what a piece feels like in the hand.
A tight weave is not a style upgrade, it is several times the hours. Two pieces of the same size can differ by a whole working day of human time.
Five checks you can do in a shop, in a photograph, or in your hands. None of them need anyone's word for it.
A locked, wrapped edge with no loose ends is the clearest single sign of careful work. Glue, staples or a thick binding suddenly appearing at the edge is usually covering something.
Light through the weave shows whether the spacing is even. Patchy light means the strips were uneven or the tension changed mid-weave — it will only look worse as the piece settles.
Hand-split strips have a slight curvature and small variation in width. Machine-cut strips are dead straight with fuzzy edges. In a photo, zoom in on a cut end.
Good bamboo springs back. A dry crackle, or a strip that whitens where it bends, means it was dried too fast or cut at the wrong age — that piece will not survive a dry winter.
The back should be nearly as tidy as the front. Weaving is finished from one side, so a back that is visibly messier tells you how much care went into the whole.
Pieces dyed dark to hide material of mixed quality. Machine-pressed panels sold as handwoven. Anything finished with glue where a locked edge should be. If a piece cannot pass the five checks above, we do not put it in a box.