The Craft
Five hundred years of it
Yathra is a woollen cloth from the Bumthang valleys of central Bhutan — Chumey, Choekhor, Tang and Ura. It is woven in narrow panels, in bands of colour and geometric motif, and it has been made in more or less the same way for around five centuries. Historically it was what kept a household warm through a Himalayan winter, and what a woman could sell when the harvest was thin.
The wool
Fleece from Bhutanese highland sheep, grazed above 3,000 metres. Cold and altitude produce a dense, lanolin-rich fleece that resists water and holds heat better than lowland wool. It is washed, hand-carded and spun before it ever reaches the loom.
One wrap in our collection is woven in merino rather than highland fleece. It is the only wool we bring in, and we use it for the pieces worn against the neck, where softness matters more than weight.
The dye
Colour comes from plants and minerals. Indigo for blue. Madder root for red. Walnut husk for brown. Turmeric and saffron for yellow. Dyes are prepared in small batches over a fire, which is the reason two pieces in the same colour are never quite the same colour — and the reason we do not try to correct it.
The loom
Bhutan weaves on two kinds of loom. The backstrap loom, tensioned by the weaver's own body, is used for the narrowest cloth. Yathra is woven on the horizontal wooden frame loom worked with foot pedals.
Neither loom can produce a panel much wider than a forearm. That limit is not a flaw to engineer around; it is what gives yathra its structure, and what makes the hand-joined seam necessary in the first place.
The seam
Panels are joined by hand with a cross-stitch. We use one thread colour for this on every piece we make, regardless of what colours are in the cloth: undyed cream, always the same gauge, always visible. We call it the Chumey seam.
Count the seams and you know how many panels went into a piece. Three panels, four panels. It is the simplest description of how a piece was built.
How long it takes
- A scarf — about three days on the loom
- A rug — two to three weeks
- A bed cover — up to a month
We publish these numbers because they are the price. Nothing about a handwoven cloth is quick, and the time is not a story we tell about the product. It is the product.
The women who weave it
Our weavers work with us on long-term terms, at fair wages, with hours that fit around their families and their fields. Weaving in Bhutan has always been women's work, done at home between other work, and we would rather build around that than against it.