Cloth

Vervaardiging: Cecilia King

Blue piece of fabric with a white cut-out motif (see M6-46). In the lengthwise direction the motif consists of 7x4 lines, each about 1 cm wide. The motif stops about 13 cm from the short side.‖ Pattern: Kindia (see M6-47)‖ Mrs. Cecilia King, a Mende Gara Dyer in Bo, first divided a half piece of damask (one piece =60 feet (Gerbrands, 1987, p.18,20) into five equal pieces. For this lapa, she folded the fabric in half and used a needle to thread raffia through the fabric in a straight line about 13 inches from the short side, to indicate where the pattern should run. Then she used raffia and a needle (through two layers of fabric) to make 4 parallel rows of small stitches, turned the piece over, and sewed in another 4 parallel rows of the pattern. She repeated this until she had sewn 7x4 rows of the pattern. Mrs. King is an old woman (in 1976) and she makes very little Gara. Mrs. King is a typical example of a Gara dyer on the smallest level (see M6-46 and Rheinhardt, 1976, p.15-21). Mrs. King had to make a special indigo dye bath for that purpose; she had to do it under quiment because that just happened to be unavailable. Quiment is an imported synthetic indigo, of which a small amount is added to the dye-bath in order to make the fabric shine while beating. These five lapas have remained quite dull. The 5 lapas which Mrs. King had made especially for K.K.Gerbrands, she could easily have sold to others; several people had asked her about it when they saw that she was working on it. The end of the Ramadan was in sight and because of the associated festivities there is always a great demand for Gara. The same is true around Christmas time (Maduike, 1976, p.54).