Cambodia Part 2--IKTT and Khmer Silk Weaving

It's been a busy spring with lots of travel, so I'm just now getting around to posting about the second half of my Cambodia trip in February. In the first half of my visit, I was in  Popae Village . The second half of my stay was spent in the Siem Reap area with five days at the forest village of IKTT , brainchild of Kikuo Morimoto. "Project Wisdom from the Forest" is a sustainable eco-artisan village on 23 hectares of land about an hour north of Siem Reap. I was there to learn about ikat weaving in the Khmer tradition, to understand the natural dyeing techniques employed, and to meet the amazing founder.

Kikuo Morimoto was born in Kyoto and trained in yuzen painting and dyeing. He moved to Cambodia via Thailand in the 1980s and has been a key figure in reviving Khmer traditional silk weaving ever since. Morimoto-san speaks his native Japanese, plus Khmer, English, Thai and even some Lao. The forest village, created from scratch, is a communal eco-village with some 150 Cambodian inhabitants on reforested land. The aim was to create a thriving, sustainable community for reviving Khmer silk weaving techniques and producing ikat textiles of the highest quality. Ten years have passed since he put up his first building on the land--a small tree house. And now the village is considered a model community--even Cambodian royalty visit each year for the IKTT silkworm festival.

A few photos from my visit:
IKTT PWF weaving workshop downstairs, shop upstairs my guest cottage on the right beside a spinning/reeling hut stirring the dye for my natural dyeing experiment with prohut tree bark my results--some hand spun silk dyed with prohut and an over dye of lime/iron ikat panel of apsara dancers ikat up close sunrise my favorite morning walk  the morning's catch fish for breakfast Women arriving at the village by bicycle with Kikuo Morimoto the IKTT shop in Siem Reap
If you visit Siem Reap, be sure to go to the IKTT shop  to see ikat textiles of the highest quality in Cambodia, made from traditional Khmer silk, hand reeled, dyed, and woven. And check out the IKTT blog (in Japanese) for even more photos and IKTT happenings in Japan.