Making things difficult

The title of this post refers to the way I tried to teach myself to whatu when making my first kakahu.  It was not the best way.  My hands would ache  so much.
Not long after completing this, I noticed, in the local paper, an advertisement  for a weaving course being offered at that time by the Open Polytec.  That same week I received a note in the mail, with a copy of the Ad, from my daughter in Auckland. Her note read something like:  ‘I think this is what you have been looking for”.  She was right!

Now, having had the advantage of being a student of an expert and having been taught, ‘in real life’ how to hold the whenu and aho, I can’t believe what I was doing.  I don’t think I could have made it any harder for myself.

When I was undertaking the challenge of a blog post for every day in November 2014, I started an entry about the first kakahu I made.  My comment then was that it was going to take time to get it right and say what I wanted.

The reason I have found it difficult to write is because the story that goes with this kakahu is interwoven with special memories of my Mum.

Mum and I started it together.  We had talked about weaving a cloak for a long time.  In fact Mum had been saving  different materials that she thought could be useful ‘one day’.  Some things, like the feathers I used, she had kept safe for more than thirty years.

I had been carefully reading, again, the book by Diggeress Te Kanawa; ‘Weaving a Kakahu’, so I felt I knew the theory of how to do it.  I had studied in detail a sample of taniko that Aunty Borgia Hakaria had shown me how to do.  We felt ready to try.

On one of Mum’s visits in the middle of 2004 we got out the cones of wool she had collected and started measuring.  After some calculations we had decided that we were going to need 400 lengths of the wool for the whenu.
We also decided that each should be 3 meters long.
It wasn’t until after Mum had measured them all that I remembered we only needed 200 because each length is folded in half.

The memory is still very vivid.  Mum got the giggles and Mum was not usually one to giggle – laugh, yes certainly but giggle like that, I don’t think I had ever seen her do it before.
She picked up all 400 lengths and dropped them all over my head as I was sitting at the table, trying very hard to be sincerely apologetic for making her do all that extra work.  It was a futile effort on my part because seeing Mum giggling was too much.  We both ended up holding our sides, unable to stop laughing.

Everything I used in creating this kakahu is something Mum had collected and saved or, like the paua shell pieces, we had gone together to buy.

Mum never got to see it finished.
The photo of the completed kakahu was taken by my sister in Foxton on the anniversary of her death on 31 October 2004.

 

The first public wearing of our kakahu was in Dunedin on 3 December 2005 when Erik wore it as he graduated from Medical School.

 

 

 

 

Erik also wore it at his wedding on 5 January 2007.

 

 

 

It continues to be part of important family occasions.