Most companies would not feel it important to take your time to explain the history of their products, who owns the company, or how the products are made. And you probably wouldn't be interested.

But we would like to introduce you to the island of Bali, to Ni Made Jati who started and runs Uluwatu, and to the people who make Uluwatu lace.

Because there is something very special about Uluwatu. Uluwatu lace has a meaning that is more appreciated if understood.

We would like to explain to you about the love and care we put into Uluwatu lace.

The Island of Bali

It has been called “the Morning of the World”. The Balinese themselves call their home “the Island of the Gods”. But no name can capture the true overwhelming beauty of Bali – a beauty so intense that visitors can go away with vivid memories and photographs and later still wonder “Is it real?”

Just east of Java, Bali is a small tropical island in the chain of thousands of volcanic islands that make up the nation of Indonesia and divide the South Pacific from the Indian Ocean. Bali is only a few degrees south of the equator and the weather is hot and humid year round.

There is a monsoon season from November through March, but monsoon season or not, the skies may cloud up suddenly and drop torrents of rain at anytime. And then just as suddenly, the rain stops, the clouds clear, and the volcanoes that tower over the center of Bali appear through the mists once again.

Down the slopes of the volcanoes the Balinese have built terraced rice fields and intricate irrigation systems to bring the waters from the mountains through the rice fields and finally to the sea. The water blesses their island, keeps their island lush and green and their rice fields bountiful. Balinese are Hindu, but they often call their religion agama tirta, or “the religion of sacred water”. Their island is blessed by the rain; every waterfall and mountain spring has its own temple to thank the water, and the holy water from these temples and the myriad tropical flowers nourished by the rains make up the offerings that are presented to the gods daily in every home and temple in Bali.

These temples inspire another name for Bali, the “Island of Temples”. There are over 10,000 public temples. The family temples, found in every Balinese home, are countless. Village and family life revolve around the frequent temple ceremonies. And although the temple exteriors are lavish with exuberant and fantastic ornament, at the centers are the quiet places, the empty spaces, where the offerings are placed and prayers are offered to the single ultimate spirit that unites all the many aspects of Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa, the one true God.

The carefully terraced rice fields, the endless multitude of highly decorated temples, the lovingly crafted offerings which are created and discarded daily – all speak to a characteristic of the Balinese people which strikes every visitor to Bali – their skill and love for the arts.

In Bali it seems there is nothing that cannot become a canvas for an artist’s imagination. Every temple is exuberantly decorated with statues and reliefs carved of the soft volcanic stone that underlies the island. Every bridge and intersection is watched over by guardian statues. Wooden rafters and columns, furniture and doors are all carved in intricate patterns, and often brightly painted and gilded in gold.

On an island where everyone is an artist, artistic ability is not regarded as a rare talent. Children learn their skills sitting at their parents’ knee, absorbing the techniques while watching painters as they paint, listening to musicians as they play. Artistic expression becomes part of a child’s nature and the skills are learned almost unconsciously. Children play at their parents’ side and learn under their gentle guidance until children as young as five years old can perform as accomplished artists.

Made Jati grew up the second child of nine in a poor fisherman’s family in the beach village of Kuta. She recalls now how her father would come home from fishing with his catch in the small morning hours. Her mother would start the wood fire, while Made and her brothers and sisters sat up sleepily where they had been cuddled together on the large woven pandan mat that was their bed. Their thatch was hut soon filled with the delicious smell of the fresh fish roasting and they would eat their late meal to the accompaniment of the dull roar of waves breaking against the shore at the end of their lane.

They were poor and sometimes that roasted fish in the midst of the night would be their only meal of the day. Yet she and her sisters learned to dance, took part in the beautiful temple ceremonies, helped their mother make the intricate daily offerings that they placed in the family temple, at the gate to their home, at the crossroads of the path that led down to the sea, and at the shore to thank the sea for the blessings it gave.

Sometimes, when the family needed extra money, Made and her mother would gather flowers from the wild hedges that grew in abundance about their home, and early the next morning they would rise to catch the pre-dawn truck (there were no buses or cars then) into the market town of Denpasar. There they would set up on a mat beside the road to sell their flowers to the women hurrying to do their market shopping in the cool hours before the sun rose above the horizon. The flowers would save the women a half-hour gathering their own flowers at home for the day’s offerings. Made and her mother would finish before the morning was well underway and then they hurried home again where Made could ready herself quickly to reach school still in time for the morning lessons. The money they made in the market was saved for the important holidays of Galungan which came twice a year, when each child would wait with mounting excitement imagining the new sarong with which their mother would surprise each of them on Galungan morning.

In Balinese there is no word for “stranger”; tourists are called tamu, literally “guest”, a guest to one’s home or to one’s village. In the 1960’s when foreign guests began to arrive in Made’s village, the local people took them into their homes. In the hot afternoons when most Balinese took shelter from the sun, the guests would go down to the beach and burn themselves on the sand. No one knew why they did this and the Balinese felt sorry for them. Made would go down to the beach with a tray of cool drinks, fresh fruit and a few sarongs to offer them. The tourists bought the drinks and fruit to relieve their suffering, sarongs to cover themselves from the burning rays of the sun.

Made’s mother set up a small shop on the edge of the sand, a simple thatch roof, a table with a row of soft drink bottles in the center, a bench for the guests to sit. The guests often stopped at Made’s mother’s shop for a cup of coffee or a soft drink and a bowl of her black rice pudding. Made remembers sleeping on the sand under the table while the strange looking foreigners talked their incomprehensible language far into the night. Sometimes she lay awake listening, making sounds like they did and pretending to herself that she could talk their odd language.

Some of the guests stayed for weeks, some for months. They became friends of the families that took them in. Some of them wanted to buy the local handicrafts to take away and resell in their own countries. Made helped them find things to buy, helped organise their purchases, schedule deliveries. And by the time she was 17, Made had her own small business making lace blouses for the guests to buy.

By the early 1980’s, Made was in business with an Australian partner, exporting thousands of garments every month. A worldwide demand for Balinese lace developed. It was not just because of Made’s company, of course - Balinese lace was perfect for surfer girl wear, light, fun and not too expensive, with lots of bright colored birds and butterflies. Made named her company “Uluwatu” after a temple that sits high above the sea and looks down on a surfing spot that was becoming world famous.

The new company became known for high quality and fun styles. Business was good, but by the mid – 1980’s the surfer girl fad had died. And with it, most of the other companies producing lace turned to other types of garments. Uluwatu stayed in business as a smaller company but with a new emphasis on design and quality. Uluwatu turned away from the surfer wear and began to reach back to the roots of Balinese handicraft to create something new.

Balinese Textiles

Lace is not a traditional Balinese handicraft. Balinese women didn’t need blouses because until very recently customary dress for Balinese women was a sarong around the waist and a bare top. But they always produced extraordinarily beautiful and intricate textiles for temple ceremonies and dance costumes.

One traditional Balinese textile is known as endek. It is produced by tie dying, but not of the whole cloth as made famous by the hippies in the 1960’s. Bundles of thread for endek are tied off and dyed before weaving, and the intricate patterns appear as the cloth takes shape on the loom. Endek is used for sarongs, both for temple and for everyday wear.

Sometimes gold and silver threads are woven into the material on the loom. This fabric is known as songket and is used for scarves or sashes, or sometimes as a rich cloth to wrap an important relic.

The famous batik sarong is widely worn in Bali, but it is in fact produced in Java.

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, sewing machines began to appear in Bali. Not electric machines, of course, because there was no electricity. The village of Kuta, for instance, only received electricity in 1978. But foot powered machines became popular in the 1930’s and are still widely used today. The most common early model was the Sinder, a Chinese copy of the Singer. More recently the Chinese Butterfly Brand has become popular, but the appearance and mechanism are identical to the old Singers that in most countries shows up only in antique markets.

With their foot-powered sewing machines, Balinese quickly learned to make lace and to master skills that were fast disappearing elsewhere in the world. And with the arrival of the Indonesian government in Bali in 1949, officials began to encourage the Balinese women to wear blouses. (The Dutch who had colonised the rest of the Dutch East Indies as they were then known, left Bali almost completely alone and interfered little with Balinese tradition.) Kebaya blouses soon became popular as garments to wear to temple, even if most women still went topless around the house.

So when the surfer girls in the early 1980’s began to buy brightly colored lace tops, hundreds of home industries started up in Bali, with two or three or a dozen machines whirring away under thatched roofs while chickens ran in and out dodging the flying pedals.

Lace in Bali Today

Balinese lace in the 1980’s was fast and cheap, though Uluwatu was better than most. When the fad died, most other lace companies “rationalised” their business. They switched to garment sewing without lace, because lace is very time-consuming and slows production drastically. Or they installed electric machines to speed lace production and cut costs (and quality). Small companies quickly had to become large companies with a thousand or more workers to take advantage of high volume production, or else they had to close their doors.

Uluwatu had never been a large company, and because Uluwatu had emphasised quality rather than volume, Made had established a particularly close relationship with many of the workers. Uluwatu had a built a small “factory” (though the rambling and relaxed collection of sheds surrounded by trees looks nothing like a conventional factory) in the provincial town of Tabanan in 1979. By the late-1980’s, Uluwatu was part of a community. The workers who sewed in their homes for Uluwatu had bought their own machines, which were significant investments for them. For Uluwatu to abandon hand-sewn lace for electric machines would devastate families who depended on Uluwatu.

With the end of the surfer wear fad, Made’s Australian partner left and Uluwatu faced a crisis. Made realised she must remake her business just to survive. Two of her sisters, Nyoman Suti and Ketut Nerthi, joined Made to help her run the company. And they felt that Uluwatu could not just abandon old workers and old methods. At the same time, they saw an opportunity to take Uluwatu in a new direction by rediscovering the handicraft roots of krawang. So Uluwatu did not cheapen the product and did not add electric machines, but Made and her sisters did re-examine how to improve Uluwatu while preserving the essentials of what they felt was the core of the company.

Our “Factory” in Tabanan

We call it a factory, but it doesn’t look much like one. A rambling collection of open sided sheds wanders down a hill, and in the center trees surround a large grassy area. You can look over the rice fields to see the sea way off in the distance. In the afternoon a breeze comes up from the west and blows through the open walls and keeps the rooms cool.

About 120 to 200 girls work here to make Uluwatu lace, with another 100 or so people helping with cutting, washing, sewing, ironing, and packing. It is difficult to say exactly how many are working day to day, because in Bali there are many ceremonies and family gatherings, and to any Balinese these are much more important than work could ever be. Some of our workers take weeks or even months off for other things that they feel are important, but in Bali we can only accept this and wait for them to return when the ceremonies are finished. It can be hard to keep schedules like this.

In 1994 we held a ceremony called Melaspas. It was a blessing for the land and for the people who work at Uluwatu. We had several days holiday while all the families gathered to assist and enjoy the ceremony.

Made would like to tell you something about our production process and quality control because it is important for an understanding of what is really special about Uluwatu. “You maybe are not interested in every detail, but we tell you about it here just if you would like to know. But at least please read about Krawang and Trimming because they are very important to our quality.”

Our material is the finest quality available in Indonesia. Our rayon is always Bintang Agung best export quality, manufactured in Bandung, Java. We inspect it upon receipt for defects to be cut out before pattern cutting can begin, because even the best fabric will have occasional natural defect areas. We then wash the fabric to preshrink and stabilise the material before starting production.

There are many different qualities of material. A cheaper material has a looser weave and thinner threads than a higher quality material. They may all look about the same when new because the threads are covered in fuzz. But after a few washings the fuzz is gone and the cheap material sags and stretches and has no life in it. This is why we always use only the best material so that after all our hard work to make the lace; the garment will stay beautiful for years of wear.

Cutting for outfits can be complex because we always lay out tops and bottoms together to ensure exact color matching, and then we mark the matched top and bottom so that they can be reunited at the end of production. This is necessary because natural fabrics like rayon, cotton, and linen always vary slightly in color between bolts, unlike polyester and other synthetics in which color can be controlled precisely. The variation is not noticeable in patterns, but we use only plain colors.

Sewing is done by a single tailor for each entire garment, rather than by an assembly line method as in most garment factories. Because of the complicated krawang production process, most garments must be sewn in several stages. For example the shoulders and yoke of a blouse may be sewn first so that the krawang can be added across the front and back of the yoke while the yoke lies flat on the table, then the side seams are sewn only after this krawang is finished. In this case, the garment generally goes back to the original tailor for the second step of sewing.

Why do we do this? Partly because our production runs tend to be small, but more importantly because with our factory emphasising quality and handicraft techniques, our people feel more responsibility and pride of workmanship by taking sole control of their own portion of the process. We couldn’t get them to work an assembly line if we wanted to.

Just as the fabric color varies slightly, so does the color of the krawang thread. In preparing the garments for krawang, we have a worker whose entire job consists of precisely matching fabric color and thread color.

Now comes the most interesting part of the process, the krawang sewing. Many visitors to our shops have seen our krawang girls demonstrating their sewing techniques and they assume that this is a marketing gimmick. It is not. This is exactly how our krawang is produced in Tabanan: it is stretched by hand on bamboo hoops and sewn on foot powered machines.

I wish we could show you in detail how the krawang is done, because their work is like a spell of magic weaving across the bamboo hoop. They follow the faintest of lines silk-screened onto the fabric to guide them in their pattern. Many visitors cannot even see these pattern lines until they are carefully pointed out. The needle whirs so fast as to be invisible to our eyes, and with no needle guard to protect them (and which would also obscure the pattern), their fingers always dance away from the haze that is the needle while the krawang take miraculous shape under their fingertips.

Of course, one girl always does an entire garment, top and bottom in the case of outfits, from start to finish. Each girl has a slightly different style to her work. And again, there is a pride of workmanship that can only be satisfied by each girl taking entire responsibility for her creation.

There are other ways to do krawang. Electric machines are available and are the primary production tool at most other krawang manufacturers. Electric machines are about 10 times faster than foot powered machines. They have a knee lever than causes the needle to vibrate; more pressure on the knee lever causes a wider swing of the needle. To make a leaf shape, for example, one starts with a slight pressure, increasing and then decreasing again as the hoop travels in a straight line across the table. The result is an extremely even, but somewhat thin textured, leaf.

(And it pains me to even mention that other electric embroidery machine now common in China, Belfast, Belgium, and other lace production centers - the computer controlled embroidery machine. So we won’t go into it.)

A foot-powered machine is completely different. The needle stays in one position, and the girl uses her hands to move the bamboo hoop back and forth under the needle. The krawang result is thick and slightly uneven because she must rotate and push and pull the hoop all at the same time. This cannot be done on an electric machine, with or without the knee lever, because the worker needs the control and the feel of the machine that the foot pedal gives her.

Is the result from a foot-powered machine really better than that from an electric machine? I suppose it really comes down to personal taste. In general, the result from an electric machine is less durable because the extremely even weave is less interlocked; a single broken thread can cause an entire section to unravel. But the thickness and to some extent the durability of the lace also depends on the amount of thread used. Electric machine lace often uses less thread because electric machines can cover an area more efficiently while using less thread, but of course they could specify a higher thread usage per area if they wanted to.

Hand made lace looks uneven, electric machine lace is very smooth. Some people prefer machine made leather goods to hand tooled leather, or mass produced furniture to hand crafted furniture, because the results are more uniform. We find the hand made products much more appealing, but finally it comes down to perceived value and personal taste. I think that the opportunity to have something that is unique and crafted by hand adds some invisible but special quality to the object.

Finishing is just as important as the krawang work, although it may not have quite the magic as does the krawang sewing. The garment is washed twice, in two different stages (to remove the fingerprints from all those magic little fingers). Then the krawang is trimmed.

Trimming may be the most critical step of the entire process. Those beautiful scalloped edges have a tail of fabric extending beyond the krawang when they finish the krawang process. This fabric is trimmed away with tiny and very sharp scissors; a thread-width too close will nick the krawang, but too far away will leave an unattractive fringe of loose threads. Look at krawang from other companies if you want to see the difference, you will probably see a long loose fringe, especially at the corners of the scallops, because they are afraid to trim too close where they might damage the krawang. Now look at Uluwatu. Watching the trimming process can be just as nerve wracking as watching the krawang process once you know what to look for.

All this attention to quality and detail and handwork comes with a disadvantage: our production volume is low. We don’t mass produce lace, we don’t sell to department stores because we don’t have the volume; our schedule is often booked out for months in advance. We wish we could make more, but we cannot do it while maintaining our quality.

Pura Uluwatu – the Uluwatu Temple

Uluwatu temple perches high on a needle of rock at the south-west extremity of Bali, jutting out into the vastness of the Indian Ocean with no other lands before it to check the swells that arise far off in Antarctic storms and roll thousands of miles to break in tropic seas at the base of the Uluwatu cliff. A Hindu saint recognised this spot 700 years ago as a particularly powerful site for a temple, and standing there today one is struck with awe at the beauty and power of creation. The sliver of rock that holds the temple seems so narrow, almost insignificant against the vastness of sea and sky. The entire cliff shudders with the impact of the waves, while monkeys shriek and scamper along walls that drop sheer to the surging foam hundreds of feet below. Across the surface of the sea, after every retreating wave, white foam curls like lace and one can see coral and sometimes sea turtles and dolphins swimming below.

Uluwatu is not far from the village of Kuta where Made grew up. Her family makes the pilgrimage to Uluwatu at each yearly “birthday” of the temple, when tens of thousands of Balinese gather over the three day celebration to give thanks to the sea the God that made it. The offerings are as beautiful as any other of the crafts of Bali, with fruits and flowers piled high, lovingly decorated with intricate palmleaf cut-outs. The essence of the fruit and the sweet smell of the flowers are wafted into heaven with the smoke of the incense. And after the gods have been presented with the invisible essence of the offering, children laugh in competition to grab the fruits and sweets before the rest of the offering is packed up to take home for the humans to enjoy.

Maybe Made named her company Uluwatu after the lacy foam that swirls on the surface of the sea below the temple, or maybe she named it in honor of the temple that was so important to her father the fisherman. She doesn’t remember now, but Pura Uluwatu is still an important place to her and her family.

And, you may wonder now, who wrote this book? Who is the “we” that speaks from time to time? Made did not write this herself, but I would like to introduce the “I”: I know her well and write can intimately about her because I am her husband. We married and moved to Bali in 1988, when I began to advise Made and her sisters on their business. If they have a love for their lace and their people and their island, then I also have a love - for Made, for her family, and for the Balinese spirit. And somehow or other, through all this, I hope that this feeling has come through to you.

I think maybe you can feel it in the lace.