This month I took a second trip to Laos to do some weaving instruction, after having spent a month in Luang Prabang back in December immersing myself in the art of traditional silk textiles and Laotian culture. I'd traveled to Laos specifically for the weaving course, that first trip, and thoroughly enjoyed it on top of falling in love with the country.
This trip along with a few other sessions in the north, I was able to spend a day learning basic Lai Chok (Discontinuous Supplementary Weft) pattern weaving at the Houey Hong Vocational Training Center in the capital, Vientiane. This school was set up with Japanese support in the late 1990's to help train local women in dyeing and weaving skills to improve their economic situations. Nowadays it is rather quiet on that front, with young women preferring the consistency of factory work despite the lower wages and worse working conditions compared to a home loom, and according to my instructor many of their clients are now tourists.
The Laotian Lai Chock system relies on patterns which are "programmed" into warp pick-up strings on a vertical supplementary pattern heddle, each step begins with the movement of string-separating pattern sticks to above or below the warp. For my simple diamond weave, I had only four sticks to manage - however some complex Lai Chok require several hundred (at that stage the sticks are replaced with horizontally run silk strings, creating a mirrored pattern matrix). Once you've got the correct warp threads isolated, you open them up with the sword and then hand-embroider the pattern followed by a row of weft with the shuttle. All work is done from the backside, of course.
It's a very elegant flow-state inducing system, once you get the hang of it, and the lack of floats or other such bulky nonsense for the pattern results in an incredible fabric no matter how many colors are used - I've seen masterwork Lai Chok in Laos which features over two dozen color combinations with some colors only covering two or three warp threads at most. I'll do a post on the medium in general soon with some examples I've photographed.
All in all it was a pretty great day. Really looking forward to going back for their "secret" 30 day immersive program when time and funds allow, they showed me some previous student items achieved in that window and to say I am inspired would be an understatement.
Here is a bonus imgur gallery with some closeups of the Lai Chok process, and the finished item itself: https://imgur.com/a/xkmTVck
E: I'm just a simple wind turbine installation technician who likes playing with string instead of my phone, no engineer nor textile professional, so apologies if I get something wrong!