Habis and Interests

What is the definition of habi? In the Bisaya-English dictionary, "habi" is "the act of weaving/weave/interlacing". - Bisaya to English Translation 

Please forgive my punny ways.

Anyway. I told you guys last post that we were going for a tribal print for my Grad Ball dress and I would have bought it yesterday. That's only partly true. Tita Mila told us to look for a store called Balikbayan near Glorietta, and we did find it, except they didn't exactly carry any indigenous prints there except for a couple of table runners and pillow cases. Hehe. But it was really nice seeing the so-called "dream weavers" (T'nalak/Tinalak) in the flesh cloth.

Today we went to Kamuning to look for fabric. But this morning my Grandma brought out some fabrics she bought in Greenhills ten years ago (so she says) that she believes were sourced from, like, Malaysia.

I trust her on that. This lowly Instagrammed picture gives it no justice, by the way. It's gorgeous in all its gold-mixed glory, but it wasn't what I was looking for.

Instead, when we hitched a taxi ride to Kamuning, we found this:

It was from a shop on the inside of the market and it cost 250 per yard (woohoo!). The people at the store estimated that we needed about six yards all in all. Imagine, the table runner (still laughing) in Balikbayan cost like, 700 bucks for about four to five feet.

It's really pretty. I was aiming for something more intricate, but this looks more Ibaloi than anything and I'm content. There was an alternative pattern for 150 a yard, and it was half as thick. I asked the lady at the store where she sourced them from and she said they came from Baguio. I trust her on that, hehe.

I want to apologize for having taken an entire post to nerd out about cloth, but let me just this once. Anyway, I bet my family will make fun of me for being dressed in a huge-ass table runner, but a lot of people are planning on skipping Grad Ball/Senior's Night because it's being held at school. I've always wanted to go on a fashionalistic (fashion + nationalism) route and this is probably one of the few chances I'll do so. If anyone asks why I wore Igorot print to a Grad Ball themed "Winter Wonderland", well... Baguio is believed to be the coldest place in the Philippines, right? My dress is gonna be the bomb, yo.