Interior designer Aloma Wang gravitates to the arts and working with her hands, so when one of her hula sisters invited her to take a class in lau hala weaving at Native Books/Na Mea Hawai‘i, she quickly agreed.
They started by making a bracelet, then a handbag and a flat mat before moving on to purses — each project geared toward mastering specific techniques leading up to hat-making.
None of it was easy. Although all the materials are provided for nominal fees in early sessions, by the time students move on to hats, they must start the laborious process from scratch, heading outdoors to gather the stiff, dried leaves of hala trees, also known as pandanus or screwpine, that are increasingly hard to find in urban Honolulu.
Before putting in the 20 hours of weaving to finish a hat, students must also process the leaves. It takes five to eight hours to scrape off serrated thorny edges and soften and flatten the curled leaves before weavers can begin stripping them into the micro-centimeter widths seen in the final product.
Wang initially used a hand-crank pasta machine to flatten her leaves, but is lucky enough to have a mechanically inclined husband who built her an electric machine that incorporates a bicycle chain and heavy steel rollers to speed up the task.
“It’s so much work but I’m so addicted to it,” said Wang, who painted in her spare time before discovering lau hala weaving. “My husband wakes up in the middle of the night and says, ‘It’s 3 o’clock in the morning. Why are you still weaving?’”
After the classes ended, Wang was the only one out of 15 students to continue weaving, a skill she now puts to use making purses and hats in diverse shapes, from boaters, safari and cowboy styles to trendy fedoras. She sells her wares from her Manoa studio under the name Hala Girl Hawai‘i and is stockpiling designs to sell with fellow weavers at the Made in Hawaii Festival this weekend.
Hats generally run $450 to $750. The cost reflects the different widths of the woven strands: The finer the strand width, the more difficult and time-consuming the process.
Each hat is unique as Wang continues to experiment with creating new patterns, but each is woven following authentic Hawaiian traditions. “With the hala I have the opportunity to be very creative, mixing pattern and weave. It’s a wonderful outlet for me,” Wang said.
Although the name Aloma sounds vaguely Hawaiian, Wang is Sri Lankan and traveled the globe before settling in Hawaii. She always felt an affinity for the islands, and only asked her mother about the origin of her non-Sri Lankan name after realizing her passion for hula and weaving. Her mom had fallen in love with the name after seeing the Oscar-nominated 1941 film “Aloma of the South Seas.”
Wang said she feels privileged to have been able to learn an art form once passed on only to family members as part of the Hawaiian oral tradition. “My kumu, Gwen Kamisugi, always says, “Once I teach you, you become my family.”
Wang recently began teaching lau hala weaving, feeling an obligation to keep the art form alive at a time when the last generation of practitioners is dying, with few willing to take up the demanding practice because of the difficulty of the task and the few market opportunities it affords.
“Let’s face it, you can buy woven place mats from the Philippines for $2. After you’ve done all the cutting, cleaning, stripping and weaving, there’s no way any of us can sell what we make for $2,” she said. “For a $450 hat, I’d probably make 50 cents an hour, and I work fast.
“But this is the kind of thing that you buy once and treasure forever, like a genuine Panama hat, that can cost $10,000,” Wang said. “One of the things Na Mea Hawai‘i/Native Books is doing is educating people through weekly classes. They’re saying, ‘Come and see how hard this is,’ so people can appreciate it and are enlightened when they see a handmade product, rather than saying, ‘I can buy that for $2.’”
Wang recently learned that one of her mother’s aunts was a weaver, which deepened her feeling of kinship with the art form.
“Every culture has weaving, mostly mats and baskets, out of necessity, whether to sleep on or to carry food, things like that. The American Indians, all these different cultures have beautiful baskets that show who they are.”
At the Bishop Museum, lau hala and makaloa collections reflect the enduring quality of fine mats. Weaver and museum cultural resource specialist Marques Hanalei Marzan said stories tied to one particular mat indicate it belonged to King Kamehameha I.
“If that’s true, it dates to the early 1800s or late 1700s, which would make it about 200 years old. The finest mats were reserved for chiefs,” Marzan said.
Although weaving skills are being perpetuated through small objects, Marzan said he doesn’t see much interest in mat-making.
“The process of mat-making is not considered as appealing or as valuable as making other things. It also takes a lot of material and is more time-consuming. Most people who make mats will make it for themselves because there’s no way to get compensated for that kind of time.”
An 8-by-10-foot mat Marzan wove from three-quarter-inch strips of lau hala sits in Hale Pili on the Bishop Museum grounds. It took him six weeks to create the mat, and he said a larger, finer mat might take a year to complete.
Marzan, 34, started learning to weave while at Castle High School, his interest piqued by growing up surrounded by his great-grandmother’s work.
“My great-grandmother was a beautiful weaver from Kona. Unfortunately, none of her children or grandchildren wanted to learn from her, so her knowledge died with her.
“I wanted to figure out how she made those things, and now I’m able to do a lot of the things she did, and happy I’m able to bring that back to the family.”
“At one time, in every Hawaiian family there was a weaver, but it’s a hard thing to do,” said Kamisugi, Wang’s weaving kumu. “Maybe they have to work or raise children, and these days everybody buys rugs for their floors. They don’t have to make mats or mattresses out of lau hala anymore, so the art form is disappearing.”
Kamisugi had time to learn after raising her children, but it took about five years to find a teacher because in earlier times, knowledge of techniques and patterns were closely guarded family secrets. She was lucky to find kumu Gladys Kukana Grace in January 1997, who was willing to share skills she feared were being lost.
In August that year, Grace and Frank Masagatani co-founded the weaving club Ulana Me Ka Lokomaika‘i (weaving with goodness and kindness from within) to serve as a support group for students who wanted to talk story, ask questions and learn more after formal classes ended. Grace believed that weaving together connected older and younger generations, and the club continues to meet from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. the first Saturday of the month at Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives, and third Saturdays at Iolani Palace.
In 2010 Grace — whose works are sought by collectors and museums — was recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship for artistic excellence and her contributions to the nation’s traditional arts heritage. She died earlier this year at age 93.
Kamisugi studied with several kumu, mostly on neighbor islands, where the art form was better preserved. Their ranks include Pohaku Kaho‘ohanohano of Maui, Elizabeth Lee of Kona and the late Esther Westmoreland.
In spite of all the labor involved in making lau hala hats, Kamisugi, who now teaches 16 patterns passed on to her by Grace, said the toughest part is finding high-quality leaves to work with, which makes it difficult for Oahu weavers. About 30 to 40 leaves are required for a hat; depending on length, 300 to 700 are required for a 5-by-6-foot mat.
“There’s a lot of traffic so the leaves are very dirty. It takes a while to wipe them clean. I was using leaves from a tree on Beretania, but they’re too dirty. I prefer country areas,” Kamisugi said.
Wang has planted a few hala trees outside her Manoa studio but fears it may be too rainy for the plants, which prefer plenty of sunshine, which also helps to dry the leaves.
Although other Polynesian cultures will harvest green leaves and set them out to dry in the sun, in Hawaiian culture the leaves are allowed to mature and dry on the tree, creating varied colors and tones that are beautiful when worked into a pattern. But there’s a difference between dry and withered. Kamisugi remembered being a student and her shock after bringing leaves to one teacher, who promptly declared them “opala” and unceremoniously dumped them in the trash.
“That was a hard lesson. I thought they were good, but gradually I learned what’s good and what’s not good. Those leaves were too old and brittle. Now when that happens with my students, I tell them gently, ‘It’s not suitable. You don’t have to listen, but you’re going to struggle because it’s going to break while you’re working with it.’ ”
In spite of the difficulties, Kamisugi said people, mostly retirees, continue to weave because they find it relaxing. “It’s a stress reliever. You have to concentrate, so you stop thinking about everything that’s been bugging you.”
———
Lau hala workshops take place 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday and Fridays at Native Books/Na Mea Hawai‘i. Call 596-8885.
