Nyonya Patchwork Unpicked
Along with several precious artifacts that I had inherited from my paternal great-grandmother were a number of patchwork items. I did not regard them with much interest until recently. They include a shield-shaped patchwork piece with an attached fabric string and a pair of square patchwork pieces with similarly attached strings.
After some research, I found that such examples of nyonya patchwork were fairly common from the late 19th century up till the 1930s. A few of my friends and relatives also have them or had seen similar pieces. Occasionally, they could even be found in the antique shops. The most common forms are the baby’s bib (buay-tah), the baby’s stomach-cover (oh-toh), shoes or jewellery wrap. Great-grandmother used the square ones to wrap her wedding slippers. Miraculously, they did their job and have kept her slippers in pristine condition for about a hundred years and counting! The smaller shield-shaped piece was used to wrap her jewellery.
These souvenirs hark back to a leisurely era when women had time to stitch and sew for the household. Remnant fabric found a new lease of life by way of being patched together to form useful articles. These testify to the frugality of the early nyonyas who wasted not. Long before our “throw-away society” started learning the importance of being green and environmentally-friendly, the early nyonyas were already practicing the virtues of “reduce, reuse, recycle”. It seems ironic that society has now gone full-circle and re-learnt such practices.
Examining the patchwork pieces closely, I discerned that they had been neatly and uniformly hand-stitched. Each square or triangle patch had been sewn to precisely the same size throughout. Sometimes, lace-trimmings were added. Such touches attest to the meticulous nature of the early nyonyas. The patches include silk, satin, voile, georgette and cotton. Batik is conspicuously absent, an indication that sarongs and kain-lepas were never cut. Most of the fabric appears to be remnants from tailoring bajus (blouses). Indeed, I found a patch of blue voile from my great-grandmother’s shoe-wrapping to be of identical to that used for one of her baju-panjang.
These little swatches of cloth reveal the fabric types and motifs that were popular a hundred years ago. They are a veritable album of samples that reveal what the early nyonyas wore.
