I was 22 years old, living in Vientiane, Laos and working for a small fair trade company. My job was to go out into the rural villages surrounding the city, find weavers, document their work, photograph their lives, and help connect them to markets that could actually sustain them. I had a Laotian colleague who translated. I had a camera and a note pad. And I had absolutely no idea what I was walking into.

The villages were small and quiet, the kind of places where the day organizes itself around light and labor. Nearly every household had a loom. And at those looms, always, were women. Grandmothers, mothers, daughters, sometimes all three working in the same space. What I didn't expect was to witness the entire process from the very beginning. The silkworms fed on mulberry leaves, growing for roughly three weeks before spinning themselves into cocoons. Those cocoons were harvested and plunged into boiling water to loosen the filaments, each one yielding a single continuous thread thousands of feet long. Several threads pulled together made one strand of silk.

The natural dyeing process was my favorite part. Women harvested plants and bark from the surrounding land, simmering them over open fires in large blackened pots until the water turned the desired color. Indigo for blues, other roots and barks for reds and yellows and browns. The skeins of silk went in pale and came out transformed, and no two batches were ever quite the same.

Next came the weaving. That same silk threaded onto hand-built wooden looms, pulled through with steady practiced hands, row by row, pattern by pattern, some pieces taking months to complete. The Lao have long transmitted their folk stories and oral history through weaving, threading symbols into silk, each one carrying spiritual meaning far beyond its ornamental beauty. Every piece of silk was a document, and I felt compelled to both share it and help preserve it.

What I witnessed in those villages was a tradition in the middle of a quiet revival. And what made it so powerful was what the income actually meant. These communities were living hand to mouth. Selling their silk wasn't supplemental, it was survival. But beyond the economics, something else was at work. For many of these women, having their own income, earned through their own skill, gave them a standing in their households they hadn't had before. The loom wasn't just a tool. It was leverage.