Mats & Fabrics

• Photograph of fine Tobi mat, made on Tobi about 1975, photographed in Honohina, Hawaii in January 2000.

     

• From the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts:  "A sash worn by duskie beauties, Lord North Island, Pacific Ocean, made from coconut frond." Photograph by Peter Black, 1979.

  

• Men's loin cloth (Eilers, 1936: plate 3)

• Coconut basket and fire fan (Eilers, 1936: plate 4)

  
  

• Cloth woven from banana (?) or hibiscus (?) fiber by Tobi school kids under the direction of old women, sometime in the 1970s.  The dye is duplicating fluid.  Photograph by Barbara Black.

      

• Mats and Sashes from the Tobi Island Collection, Tübingen University. Sammlung des Instituts für Ethnologie der Universität Tübingen.
  
  
• Men's loincloths from Tobi made from banana fiber and collected in the early 1900s by members of the Thilenius Expedition (for information about the Thilenius Expedition, see Ifiri Doitch). The supplementary weft designs show unmistakable kinship with the Fais machi and reinforce the oral histories of an ancient Fais-Tobi link. Photographed at the Linden Museum, Stuttgart by Donald Rubinstein in July 2010.
  
  The Tobian word for loin cloth is tah (Justin Andrew, 2010) and the Tobian word, machih or machiye, seems to refer to the cloth woven from hibiscus fibers and used for women's skirts.
  

        
  

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Updated: May 6, 2021