It’s an incredible thing to witness craft transform in front of you. During a trip with Esther Cho, and Nhung Tran from Zó Project, to Da Bac Village in Vietnam we had the oppurtunity to conduct a workshop focusing on the transformation of dó bark into Korean paper weaving, jiseung, and to bark thread. Esther and I had learned these techniques from our wonderful teacher, Aimee Lee, during our hanji retreat in July 2023.

Here’s Esther demonstrating how to make jiseung with the Dao Tien women in the Da Bac Village, and Nhung translating the process:

We noticed a lot of women there having moments where they were remembering their grandparents do a similar thing with weaving. It wasn’t quite the same but you could see everyone actively intrigued with the process.

We did an additional workshop to demonstrate how to make bark thread out of cooked dướng (paper mulberry). I was able to show a specific technique I learned from Aimee to spin cooked bark into a continuous thread.

There were a lot of curiosities to this process. The same kind of questioning that was happening during Esther’s jiseung workshop, except this time some of the cô (aunties) started examing the fiber and tried another process that they had learned from their grandparents. Spinning the bark on their thigh to create a continuous thread.

The results! Absolutely beautiful thread. I remember stopping what I was doing and the teacher quickly becomes the student. I was so excited about how the community was being remembering the ancestral knowledge of working with the fiber. Previously, hemp was used to spin fiber into weaving for cloth. This is the first time dó, a fiber used for papermaking is being used as textile. Both Nhung and I were over the moon about the sharing of knowledge to unlock the stored knowledge in everyone’s hands.

Dó to jiseung, to thread

Paper for the Vote