Woman's blouse (albong takmun)

This striking woman’s blouse is decorated with hundreds of shell sequins, each hand cut, and individually sewn into patterns that contrast with the dark-brown base cloth. Traditional women’s blouses in many areas of the southern Philippines are often T-shaped, short-waisted, and highly decorated. They can be embellished with embroidery, beads, sequins, and glass buttons.

The Bagobo and Blaan women of Mindanao were remarkable weavers and often worked with fibers extracted from the leaves or stems of plants. In this case the weaver used fibers from abaca, a species of banana native to the Philippines. From extracting, cleaning, sorting, and softening the fibers from the plant, to drying and then carefully hand-tying each delicate thread together, the process of preparing the threads to weave can take many weeks. Dyeing and weaving a textile can then add weeks more to the process.