Abaca & Ikat: Craftsmanship From The Philippines

Most people who own something woven from abaca have never heard the word before. That's not a criticism — it's simply a fibre that does its best work quietly, in placemats and rope and paper currency and the lining of teabags, almost never announcing itself. But the plant it comes from, and the process used to turn it into the patterned cloth we sell as part of The Home Edit, deserves a proper introduction.

What abaca actually is

Abaca is not a tree, despite looking like one. It's Musa textilis — a species of banana, native to the Philippines, that grows what looks like a trunk but is really layers of overlapping leaf stalks wrapped around a much smaller fleshy stem. A mature plant reaches 4 to 6 metres tall, with 12 to 30 individual stalks radiating from a single root system.

The fibre lives inside those leaf stalks, in the sheath layers. It has long been called "Manila hemp" in international trade, though it has no botanical relation to hemp at all — the name stuck because the fibre was historically exported through the port of Manila. By weight, abaca is considered one of the strongest natural fibres in the world, with individual fibres running up to three metres long and genuinely resistant to salt water, which is exactly why it became the standard material for marine rope long before synthetic alternatives existed.

From plant to fibre: a process that resists shortcuts

Turning a living plant into usable thread takes real physical labour, and very little of it has been successfully mechanised even now. A plant takes between twelve and twenty-five months to mature before its first harvest, and can then be harvested again every three to eight months for years afterward.

1. Topping. Mature leaf stalks are cut at the base using a long-handled knife, just after the plant flowers but before fruit appears.
2. Tumbling. The cut stalks are brought down and gathered using a bolo knife — the traditional Filipino blade also used for clearing undergrowth.
3. Tuxying. Each leaf sheath is separated into its primary and secondary layers, and an incision is made to begin freeing the fibre from the pulp around it.
4. Stripping. The fibre is scraped free of pulp, traditionally by hand — a method called hagotan — pulling each strip through a tool that removes everything except the long, pale fibre strand underneath.
5. Drying. Fibres are hung and dried naturally in the sun until pliant rather than brittle.
6. Grading and bundling. Fibres are sorted by fineness and colour — from near-white inner fibres to darker outer ones — and bundled for weaving.

Only once all of that is done does weaving even begin. In communities like the Daraghuyan, the women take dried fibre bundles and hand-rub them — a motion similar to washing clothes — to soften them before they're individually knotted end to end, fine fibres reserved for the lengthwise warp threads and coarser ones for the crosswise weft. Every join is a tiny, deliberate knot, tied so precisely the connection becomes nearly invisible in the finished cloth.

Abaca remains a livelihood crop across the Philippine highlands, grown by smallholder farming communities. Image: ABS-CBN News.

What ikat actually means

The word "ikat" comes from the Malay mengikat — to tie or to bind. It describes a resist-dyeing technique that is, at its core, completely different from printing a pattern onto finished cloth. In ikat, the pattern goes into the thread, before a single pass of the loom has happened.

Bundles of fibre are tightly wrapped and bound in specific places according to a planned design. Wherever the binding sits, dye cannot reach the fibre underneath — a "resist." The bound bundle is dipped in dye. Where it was wrapped, the fibre stays its original colour; everywhere else, it takes the dye. For multi-coloured designs, the bindings are then partially removed, retied in new positions, and the bundle is dyed again in a different colour — sometimes repeated many times over for a single piece of cloth.

Only after all of that dyeing is finished are the bindings removed completely and the dyed threads finally set up on the loom to be woven.

Thread bundles bound and resist-dyed before weaving — the defining step of true ikat. Image: Kit Kemp.

Why the edges blur

If you've ever looked closely at a genuine ikat textile, you've probably noticed that the pattern edges aren't crisp. They feather very slightly, almost like a long-exposure photograph of a sharp line. That softness isn't a flaw in the weaving — it's a structural consequence of the technique itself.

Binding never resists dye with complete precision; some colour always seeps slightly under the ties. And because the dyed threads then have to be aligned by hand on the loom, tiny shifts of a millimetre or two between threads are inevitable across the width of the cloth. The result is the soft-edged, almost luminous quality that ikat is recognised for worldwide — in India, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Japan, and the Philippines alike, each culture arriving at variations of the same idea independently or through centuries of trade contact.

Where our placemats come from

The abaca ikat placemats in our Home Edit are woven by the Daraghuyan Tribe, one of seven indigenous communities of Bukidnon, in the highland interior of Mindanao. Their weave is called pinanggabol, made on a vertical loom using abaca fibre harvested from the forest around their community.

Before a Daraghuyan woman begins her day at the loom, she performs a ritual — a small act of intention that precedes the work itself. It's a detail that tells you everything about how this craft is regarded locally: not as production, but as something closer to practice. The ikat patterning on these particular placemats is achieved through a tie-dye technique combining plant pigments with traditional dyeing knowledge specific to the community, producing the soft, two-toned gradients you see in the finished cloth.

The finished pinanggabol weave — pattern locked into the fibre itself, not printed on top.

Buying one of these sets isn't simply buying a placemat. It's a small, direct line of support to a weaving tradition that has survived in a region also known for being situated in a typhoon corridor — where storms regularly threaten abaca plantations and the livelihoods built around them. Every set sold is a vote, in a very small way, for that tradition continuing into the next generation of weavers.