Tela de lenguas cloth is produced using the ikat technique.

The finished product - Tela de lenguas cloth.

Passing the dyed skeins back onto spools for weaving into cloth.

Spools ready to be woven into cloth.

After dyeing, the threads are carefully set up on a loom, leaving the pattern to emerge during weaving.

The traditional watery-blue tela de lenguas remains extremely popular throughout Mallorca.

There are around 300 patterns and colours to choose from.

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When it comes to decorating with fabrics, nothing says Mallorca like
the distinctive ‘cloth of tongues’. In Pollença, the Vicenç family continue to produce cloth with the characteristic diamond and flame-shaped motifs

At New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art you can admire a 10th-century fragment of  Yemeni fabric, still beautiful after over a thousand years. These striped textiles of Yemen, with their striking patterns of blurred arrowheads and diamonds were famous in medieval times throughout the Islamic world, which then included most of peninsular Spain as well as the Balearic Islands.

In Pollença you can see similar fabrics, with diamond, flame and lozenge-shape patterns and the trademark “out-of-focus” look, often in watery blue. These are not centuries old however, but were woven just yesterday.

Called “cloth of tongues” – “tela de lenguas” in Spanish and “roba de llengües” in Catalan – it’s made just like the fragile Yemeni fragments using the ikat technique, in which the threads are dyed before being placed on the loom. The term ikat is derived from a Malay-Indonesian word which means “to bind” or “to tie” and the method entails tightly tying the cotton threads in bundles so some parts of the thread are covered and will not take on colour when dipped into the dye. It’s a process not unlike tie-dyeing. From Southeast Asia the method spread throughout the Middle East, into China, Africa and Europe. The ikat was all the rage in 18th-century European fashion, and may have come to Mallorca from France, where it was particularly popular, soon afterwards. Fabrics are fragile, though, and there aren’t many old fragments, meaning it’s difficult to trace connections. And there’s no shortage of, well, old yarns.

“Nobody really knows how the design got to Mallorca,” explains Caterina Vicenç of Teixits Vicens, a Pollença family-run factory which still makes the pattern today in the traditional way.

“Some say that it came to Mallorca along the silk trade routes. In fact, you can find very similar ways of production in the East. Whatever the case, when the design reached the islands, it adapted to its new Mediterranean home and the Mediterranean character, and the sky-blue colour became the favourite.”

Caterina comes from a long line of weavers. Her father was the late Martí Vicenç Alemany, who revitalised the family business in the years after the war and who died in 1995.

“It’s a family tradition going back more than 200 years, to the time of my late husband’s great-grandfather,” says Antonia Capllonch, Martí’s widow and the director of the family business. “My father-in-law started producing tela de lenguas in Pollença but he died very young during the Civil War so he wasn’t able to pass the trade on to his sons, Martí and Rafa, who were still too young. Years later my husband Martí found his father’s notebooks with the drawings in them and he used these to reinvent the tela de lenguas. And he didn’t just produce the traditional designs. He was very artistic and tremendously creative and he came up with all sorts of new designs and patterns. He knew how to play with colour better than anyone else: he was always more of an artist than an artisan.”

Indeed, in the nearby Martí Vicenç Museum at the foot of the steep Calvari hill in the centre of Pollença, you can see the master weaver’s paintings and sculptures alongside displays of looms with the threads set up and the shuttles ready to go to work.

The first stage in the production process entails stretching the undyed cotton threads–or warp–on a frame. The next step is to sketch out on the threads the intended design. The threads are then removed from the frame and those parts to be left white are covered with water-repellent bindings or they might merely be bound very tightly. Bundles of white cotton threads are then dipped into vats and, according to the pattern desired, are selectively dyed–so that only those parts of the cotton that are unprotected will take on colour. The threads are then taken to weaving workshops, wound back onto spools and woven into cloth. It’s a laborious process and the result is a cloth which is patterned on both sides, into which linen is woven to give the finished cloth greater body.

“There are 15 of us working here and we deal with every stage of the process including making curtains, sofas, table cloths, and bedspreads,” explains Antonia. “We use linen and cotton: they have a scent of the sea, the countryside. And they’re enormously adaptable, even to the most contemporary spaces.

“Demand is high,” she goes on, adding that there are some 300 patterns and motifs. “People love coming in  and looking at all the different colours and patterns and they usually come back for more. We have customers all over the world, but naturally most of them are here in Mallorca.”

Ironically, the tela de lenguas industry is now coming under threat from the very region which gave the world the technique in the first place. “The biggest challenge is to keep going, to stay alive, in the face of such stiff competition from the Far East.
“We try very hard to maintain the Mallorcan character of the fabrics. Our main goal is to offer a fresh, quality product, that stands out from the crowd and that’s of the highest quality.”

This doen’t mean that the Vicenç family remain totally tied to tradition, though. “It’s important that we change with the times and don’t stay stuck in the past. Our customers appreciate our efforts and give us a tremendous amount of support”.

When:	Tue-Sat: 10.30am-5.30pm. Sun: 10.30am-2pm
Where:	Martí Vicenç Museum (Displays traditional Mallorcan fabrics) C/ Calvari 10. Teixits Vicens,Rotonda Can Berenguer, Pollença
Phone:	971 532 867 971 530 450
Web:	http://www.teixitsvicens.com	Where