The Clack of the Loom Behind the Courtyard Wall
You hear it before you find it. A soft wooden clack, a pause, a thump, another clack, steady as breathing, coming from behind a family compound wall somewhere east of Ubud. Follow it through the gate and there she is at the back of the courtyard, sitting on a narrow bench at a wooden loom, feet working the pedals, one hand throwing the shuttle across and the other pulling the beater back hard against the cloth.
This is endek, Bali’s own ikat, and the trick of it happens long before the loom. The pattern isn’t woven in. It’s dyed into the thread itself. Bundles of plain weft thread are stretched on a frame and tied off, section by section, with plastic raffia, so that when they go into the dye bath the bound parts stay pale. Untie, rebind, dye again in a second color, and again. By the time a spool reaches the shuttle, every strand already carries its share of the design, and the weaver’s job is to line each pass up so the picture comes into focus.
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Watch for a while and you’ll see why a single sarong length takes days. Each pass of the shuttle adds one thread’s width. Every so often she stops, runs a thumb along the edge, and nudges a line of color a hair to the left so the diamond or the flower stays crisp. The edges of the motifs come out slightly feathered, and that soft blur is how you tell real ikat from a print.
Endek is woven across Bali, in Gianyar, Klungkung, Karangasem and beyond, and it’s very much alive. Since 2021 the provincial government has asked people to wear it on Tuesdays, so if you’re in town that day, look around: bank tellers, teachers and office workers in matching endek shirts. That same year it walked the runway in Paris, in Dior’s Spring/Summer collection.
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If you’d like to take a piece home, buy it where it’s made if you can, and ask how long it took. The answer is part of what you’re paying for. Our Ubud shopping guide covers markets and artisan villages, and this guide to Balinese traditional clothes explains when endek is worn. It sits happily alongside the other crafts you’ll hear before you see, like the woodcarver knocking behind the garden wall and the bamboo that becomes a basket by afternoon. When you stay at a staffed villa in Ubud, ask the team. Someone always has an aunt or a cousin who still weaves.
So if a soft wooden clack drifts over a wall on your morning walk, follow it. Somewhere on the other side, a pattern is coming into focus one thread at a time.
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