There are two reasons to care about the weaving in Sidemen. The first is that it is the thing that makes this a specific valley rather than a green one: plenty of places in Bali have rice terraces, and almost nowhere still has this. The second is more practical. It is the one hour of your trip where you can watch somebody do something genuinely difficult, ask them about it, and buy the result from the person who made it.
None of it is put on for visitors. That is the whole character of it.
What is actually being made
Two cloths, and they are not the same thing.
Endek is the everyday one. It is a weft ikat: the thread is tied off in sections and dyed before it goes on the loom, so the pattern exists in the yarn and appears as the cloth is woven. That is why the edges of an endek motif look slightly feathered rather than printed. It is worn constantly in Bali, and since the provincial government began requiring it in offices and schools on certain days, a good deal more of it is worn than a decade ago.
Songket is the formal one. It is woven with supplementary gold or silver thread laid in over the base cloth, so the pattern sits proud of the surface and catches the light. It is temple and ceremony cloth, worn at weddings and tooth filings and the big calendar days. A full songket sarong is weeks of one person's work and priced accordingly.
Both are woven here on backstrap looms, where the tension in the warp comes from the weaver's own body leaning back against a strap. It is slow, physical, and completely unmechanised.
Why here
Sidemen has been a weaving village for a very long time, and the reasons it still is are unromantic: the valley was never on the tourist road, so the trade was never displaced by something more profitable, and enough households kept it going as a supplementary income alongside the rice that the skills passed down without a break.
It survives in family compounds rather than in a single workshop. Walk the main road and the lanes off it and you will hear the looms before you see them.
Visiting a workshop
There is no ticket, no tour and no opening time. The weaving is done in the front part of a family compound, often with the door open onto the road, and the normal way to visit is to be visibly interested and wait to be waved in.
A few things that make it a better visit:
- Go in the morning. People weave when the light is good and it is cool. By mid-afternoon there is often nobody at the loom.
- Ask before photographing. Somebody working in their own front room is not an exhibit. Almost everybody says yes.
- Ask what the pattern is. Motifs carry meaning and origin, and most weavers are pleased to be asked something beyond how long it takes.
- Do not haggle hard. You are in somebody's house buying a thing they made. Prices here are already a fraction of what the same cloth costs in a Seminyak boutique, and the gap between what you would pay and what you would like to pay is worth more to them than to you.
- Bring cash. Almost nowhere in the valley takes a card for this.
Telling the real thing from the printed thing
Bali sells a great deal of machine-printed cloth that looks like ikat at a glance, and some of it is sold as ikat.
The reliable test is the back. On a genuinely woven ikat or songket, the pattern exists in the structure of the cloth, so the reverse is recognisably the same design, usually with the supplementary threads running loose across it in songket. On a print, the back is faded, blurred or plain white.
The second test is the edge of the motif. Woven ikat has a slight feathering where the dyed sections meet, because thread tied by hand never lines up perfectly. That imprecision is the signature of the technique, not a flaw. A crisp, mechanically exact edge means a printer.
The third is simply price. A hand-woven songket sarong cannot cost what a printed one costs, and nobody in the valley is selling weeks of work at a loss.
What to buy, and what it is for
A length of endek is the useful thing to take home: it is cotton or a cotton blend, it behaves like fabric, and it makes a shirt or a dress or a table runner without any ceremony about it.
Songket is an heirloom object and should be bought as one. It is stiff, heavy, and not something you will casually wear in Europe. If you want it, buy the good one rather than the cheap one, because the cheap one is the compromised version of a thing whose entire point is that it is not compromised.
A sarong and sash for temple visits is worth buying on day one regardless. You will need it, it costs very little, and buying it here rather than at a temple entrance means it is a decent one.
