A Random Textile Factory

It wasn’t in the little itinerary booklet the company provided us with, but we made an excursion to a textile factory while we were in the Jimbaran area. The workers paid very little attention to us. I know they get a fair amount of visitors because another group went through right after us and we all ended up on the sales floor.

We started in a central courtyard where they had a rather impressive out building. It had some religious meaning, but I didn’t catch the particulars. To the right and front a number of racks held yarns that had been dyed.

First the yarn is wrapped in a set pattern. The wrapped segments resist the dye the same way the fabric that has been coated in wax resists dye in batik. The yarn might go through the process a number of times to generate a complicated pattern of color before being strung on the loom.

Once on the loom, the yarns are assembled in precise order. The simple back and forth of the shuttle cock is enough to generate the entire pattern. No further dye work necessary.

Bicycle tires are used to mount the thread on the shuttles.

An example of each pattern is kept on hand in the form of threads strung up on a rack. When the yard is wrapped, it is held in front of and matched to this rack.

A little over half of the factory floor space was given over to the hand looms. Maybe a dozen women worked them while we were there. That isn’t much considering there must have been thirty looms all in a large concrete floor.

They receive between 35,000 and 50,000 rupia per day. Move the decimal over four places to get the US dollar equivalent. In that time they are likely to produce between one and two meters of fabric. On a loom at home they are likely to do twice as much and earn twice as much. There is no minimum wage or laws governing work time in Indonesia.

Many of the women working here married young – often by fifteen years of age. Though the Indonesian government encourages women to wait until 21 and men to wait until 25, there are no laws limiting earlier marriages.

Often the women who marry that young don’t make it through junior high school. If she wants a divorce, all she had to do is go back to her parents for six months, but she might not be allowed to take her son with her or visit him afterwards.

The man on the right is a designer who is creating a new design to be used with the modern machines that have recently been brought into the factory. Though they are often down for repairs, the machines can produce far more fabric much more quickly than the women on hand looms.

They use several different processes. In one case, the threads used on the machine loom are dyed much like for the hand looms. Or at least the threads were already colored as they went through. In another area they were clearly printing the design onto white fabric on just one side.

As a result they are able to make a wide verity of fabrics in a range of quality.

I did not buy any of the fabric at this facility. The prices weren’t quite tempting enough when I’d already picked up so much in other places along the way. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised to find some of their product in my local fabric store. Though they didn’t consider it a lot, they do export.

As to whether they were planning on leaving the hand-loom completely behind in the future, I couldn’t say. Probably as long as they can make a profit on it, they will keep it going.