Maita Subba lives in the upper third floor apartment, where she also weaves at her floor loom near a sunny window. In her early sixties Maita is a superb weaver, technically and aesthetically (Rodgers and Umunna, 2017, Path to Empowerment, pp. 25-27). Her thread color palette and her motifs now extend far beyond the traditional jewel tones and zigzag patterns of Bhutanese weaving of the sort she learned in the refugee camp craft house. Her textiles are individualized, vibrantly creative, and distinctly her own.
She specializes in head cloth-sized textiles. These can be used as head wraps, indeed, but also as table runners, wall hangings, or fashion scarves. Sometimes her cloths are exuberantly long, even impractically so. Maita controls all stages of cloth production once she has her threads in hand, from RAW. She and fellow weavers often warp their looms in her upstairs apartment, by turning a table or two chairs over and using the legs to wind the warps around.
In our various talks with Maita it has always been clear that she is fully aware of the excellence of her textiles. A particularly striking technique she uses is to work in supplemental wefts for a series of repeated zigzag patterns across the width of a cloth as it grows on the loom. She creates bold geometric designs, occasionally working with metallic threads. One time when we exclaimed over the beauty of a particularly eye-catching magenta, blue, green, and purple cloth and asked if one of us could possibly buy it, Maita replied, No, she was keeping this remarkable cloth for her own use.
We talked often with Maita about how she learned her craft and honed it to such a high extent. She told us that while still in Bhutan she did not have the opportunity to attend formal school as a child and youth; she kept to household and farm tasks. She married at a young age. After her family’s refugee flight to the camp in Nepal (when she was 26 years old) Maita learned to weave in the craft house there. That cloth work was for making money but she said that she really enjoys weaving now in her home in Worcester. It offers her a respite, she said, from her workaday tasks at her job in town (she works part-time at a local package and shipping company in Worcester).
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