Project Dongengan: Introducing Dongengan and Indonesia's traditional cloth

My sister and I have been busy with my not-so-little project outside work of creating a small clothing line made from traditional material sourced in Indonesia. It started as my sister's project of developing a fashion line and she asked me to join her because there are just too many things to do. Since I've always loved wearing things from her clothing line, I didn't hesitate to lend a hand.

The brand name is Dongengan, derived from the word "Dongeng" which in Indonesian means Fable. Currently, we only do custom order since we only have 1 or 2 of each materials, making it rather difficult to premade the clothes since people could love the materials but not the outfit.

Most of the materials we use in our line consist of batik, hand woven material with ikat mofit and hand embroidered material called songket. Each of the region in Indonesia has developed their own patterns and methods of dying the cloth and threads. It's just totally mind blowing to see the craftsmanship of each of the cloth and realizing the number of hours spent for creating a piece of cloth. Unfortunately, the rise of traditional materials to fame has been abused by textile manufacturer into creating batik and weaving patterns that are printed on cotton or silk. Since it's an automated process done by machine, the cost is much cheaper and this hurts the craft

I feel truly blessed to be involved in this project and hopefully through this project we can help to preserve our heritage of traditional materials.

To end this post, I will show you some of our creations. I will also provide updates on our projects and creations from time to time. Hope you fall in love with the beautiful materials as I do... :)

Songket Bali dress - made from hand woven material

Back from another hiatus...

Ok, somehow going on hiatus has become a habit of mine. I am juggling so many roles in life that whenever things get super busy, I need to drop some balls roles to continue juggling. I have been developing a small fashion house with my sister where she is in charge of the ready wear collection and production as a whole, while I am developing the traditional line. It has been a fun yet challenging year since sourcing and transforming traditional Indonesian materials are not as easy as it seems. But I'm proud to take part in promoting Indonesian materials locally as well as internationally (through various online media).

I will share some pictures of my treasured findings and design through this blog. Hopefully these images can inspire you or simply brighten your days :)

*Please note that most images are captured using my iPhone or android since I do not always have my DSLR with me*