The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes by Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow;Chas. Wilkes;Fedor Jagor;Tomás de Comyn
page 65 of 732 (08%)
page 65 of 732 (08%)
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lithographs in frames, composed the furniture of the interior. The
cleanliness of the house and the arrangement of its contents testified to the existence of order and prosperity. [Tapis weaving.] I found the women in almost all the houses occupied in weaving tapis, which have a great reputation in the Manila market. They are narrow, thickly-woven silk scarves, six varas in length, with oblique white stripes on a dark-brown ground. They are worn above the sarong. [Petaca cigar cases.] Baliwag is also especially famous for its petaca [60]cigar-cases, which surpass all others in delicacy of workmanship. They are not made of straw, but of fine strips of Spanish cane, and particularly from the lower ends of the leaf-stalks of the calamusart, which is said to grow only in the province of Nueva Ecija. [Preparation of material.] A bundle of a hundred selected stalks, a couple of feet long, costs about six reals. When these stalks have been split lengthways into four or five pieces, the inner wood is removed, till nothing but the outer part remains. The thin strips thus obtained are drawn by the hand between a convex block and a knife fixed in a sloping position, and between a couple of steel blades which nearly meet. [Costly weaving.] It is a task requiring much patience and practice. In the first operation, as a rule, quite one-half of the stems are broken, and in the second more than half, so that scarcely twenty per cent of the stalks survive the final process. In very fine matting the proportionate loss is still greater. The plaiting is done on wooden cylinders. A case of average workmanship, which costs two |
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