Katte Geneta

Spinning Philippine Threads 

Never bring your needle to school. 

Since childhood, my interest in textile work was apparent, to put it mildly. At six years old, I enjoyed sitting in my rattan rocking chair, crocheting like a lola (grandmother), and I remember my dad asking, “Shouldn’t you be playing outside?” Sewing, crocheting, and playing pares-pares were all things I learned and did growing up in a Filipino household. I remember them with fondness now. 

In second grade, an unfinished sewing project from home was quickly stashed in my desk—perhaps I would have time to finish it at school!  

Midday, seated at my desk, I slid out of my chair to leave for lunch and I’ll never forget my shock at seeing my sewing needle lodged in the middle of my thigh, up to the eye of the needle. I silently pulled out the needle to hide my terror.  

Much later around the time I had my firstborn, after many years of sewing and textiles despite the trauma with that sewing needle, I learned to weave, American style. The process of turning thread into cloth on the loom was a welcome meditation. Its repetitiveness and lull felt oddly familiar, like a practice that I was relearning in my bones. It was great fun, comforting. Like I was again on the rocking chair. 

Around the time I had my second child, I made it my intention to learn to spin fiber. Spinning or handspinning is the practice of taking the raw fiber that cloth is made from—like cotton boll from the plant, or wool, alpaca, silk—and turning it into thread or yarn for weaving. That woven fabric would then become either a scarf, blanket, sewn into a garment, or simply left as yardage. 

Watch a video about spinning and weaving (:51 seconds)

I found wool, alpaca, and silk the fastest to learn to spin. Cotton had a reputation to be challenging because the short length of its fibers require more twist. I received Philippine farm-grown cotton from a friend and indeed my thread was knotty, slubby, and uneven.  

I consulted the internet on how to spin cotton and finally found a helpful tutorial except it was by a Southern lady who, at her spinning wheel, spoke with veneration about her Confederate ancestors who also spun for many generations.  

As a Filipino American born of immigrants, I felt unwelcome to watch the video, but she had great spinning technical advice nonetheless and it greatly improved my spinning of cotton. 

When you spin any kind of thread, it’s not always perfect. There will be places where there are stops and starts, where the spinner has to rejoin old and new threads, or ply threads together to make them stronger. The joins aren’t always seamless and clean. 

I tell the story to a lot of people, especially Filipinos and Filipino Americans, that the reason we continue in our work—whether it be weaving, spinning, dancing, cooking, research, art, being!—is there will be stops and starts in the thread, and we will need to find ways to rejoin, to ply, to weave. Sometimes that space between threads—that discontinuity—is what some find too big or too disheartening a barrier to overcome: Did we forget our stories? Were we colonized for too long? Will we forget our language? Am I Filipino enough? 

Handspinning is a practice that is so rare to find in the Philippines now, even where natural fiber is abundant. I find it to be one of the examples of a thread that hasn’t been rejoined yet by community. But my hope is that in learning it myself, if I learn it, I’m okay to be that slubby knot in the in the continuous thread, and if I teach it to my children and friends, they learned spinning from their community. That other threads, too, will find their ways and people. 

My daughter is in second grade now and today asked, “What was your favorite thing to do in second grade?” I think I’ll tell her my needle story.