Keywords

1 Introduction

The fabric which was highly favored in Malaysia for fashioning traditional costumes is songket. Songket is a luxurious product made by weaving silk and gold threads in various indigenous traditional patterns which are very beautiful and extremely varied. In “kain songket,” kain refers to the cloth or woven material and also the sarong. Most of the Malays used to wear it as clothing during daily or ceremonial occasions such as kain sarung with baju kurung or kebaya. In the olden days, kain songket was only used by the royalties and people of the palace. “Tenunan songket benang emas” and “kain limar bersongket” were the most popular handwoven fabrics which are often woven for the imperial family. But nowadays, the kain songket is being worn from the ordinary people to the royalties. The history of songket weaving is very difficult to be identified. This is due to the source of reference which is limited and the material itself is very sensitive to be turned into evidence. However today in Malaysia, Terengganu and Kelantan are the two main areas where weavings are still carried out. The techniques and motifs of the Malay weaving could be from the influenced of China, Cambodia, India, and Arab. This condition may be also influenced toward the development of songket weaving in the East Coast Malaysia. However, this paper only concentrates on the pattern of the traditional sarong songket and to find out the classification of wallpaper pattern and frieze pattern in songket textile design.

2 Songket

The process of an extra weft weaves where gold threads are inserted into plain weave to create motifs and patterns on the woven fabric is called s ongket weaving. Gold-, silver-, and metallic-colored threads are the additional weft threads the Malay weavers use to weave the songket. There are about ten steps in making songket. The process of songket starts with mencelup warna pada benang (dyeing), menerai, menganing (warping), mengulung (rolling the warps), menyampak (inserting warp through the reed), mengarat (making shafts), meneguh (tensioning the warps), gigi belalang (making tekat 3 or 5), menyongket (uplifting warps for songket pattern), and finally menenun (weaving) [1].

The structure of songket patterns is being created with six basic textile patterns. The six basic textile patterns are full-patterned songket (corak bunga penuh), isolated pattern (songket bunga bertabur), stripe patterns (songket corak jalur berdiri and corak jalur melintang), zigzag patterns (songket corak siku keluang), checkers (songket tapak catur), and the triangle shape of bamboo shoot (songket pucuk rebung) [1]. At the same time, the motif of songket weaving is inspired from plants, cosmos, earth, animals, and nature. The design is mainly concentrated on geometry, whether it is abstract, stylistic, or realistic [2]. The structure of the songket fabrics are mainly in sarong and kain lepas (shawls). Therefore, the structure of sarong songket consists of “kepala kain,” “badan kain,” and “kaki kain” which include the “mengapit kepala kain” and the “kendik.” The “kendik” is the smaller board pattern that is placed at the “pengapit kepala kain” or at the boarder of kaki kain sarong. Meanwhile, the structure of kain songket lepas consists of punca kain, badan kain, and kaki kain.

2.1 Structure of Kain Sarong Songket (Fig. 28.1)

Fig. 28.1
figure 1

(a) Kepala kain, (b) badan kain, (c) kaki kain, (d) pengapit kepala kain

Full size image

2.2 Structure of Kain Lepas Songket (Shawl) (Fig. 28.2)

Fig. 28.2
figure 2

(a) Punca kain, (b) badan kain, (c) kaki kain, (d) pengapit badan kain

Full size image

3 Related Work

Most work related to classifying the pattern in symmetry group mainly aims to study the geometrical concepts of symmetry and pattern. In the work of Djbril M.O. and Thani R.O.H, the authors propose a general computational model for the extraction of the symmetry features of Islamic geometric pattern (IGP) images. In E. Rokiah et al.’s paper, the authors discussed the mathematical thinking of the weavers and the process of songket weaving. M. A. Hann writes about the classification and analysis of regular geometric patterns with particular reference to textiles. For this paper, it is based on the traditional Malay songket patterns.

4 Geometry, Symmetry, and Symmetry Group

The word geometry comes from the Greek words “geo” meaning earth and “metria” meaning mantra or dimension [3]. Geometry is the study of shape, size, and position of both flat-plane figures such as lines, circles, ellipses, triangles, rectangles, and polygons, objects that repeat in an order [4]. The word symmetry also comes from the Greek word symmetria which means same measure. Symmetry is when one shape becomes exactly like another if we flip, slide, or turn it. In other words, symmetry is a reflection or mirror. Symmetry is one of the elements in geometry.

The words transformations and symmetry operations are commonly related to the process of moving a motif to another position in the pattern. These processes are involved in motifs and patterns which may be classified with respect to their symmetry characteristics such as translation, reflection, rotation, and glide reflection [5, 6]. Symmetries of a pattern have a group structure. The group structure is named symmetry group of the pattern. Symmetry group consists of three types of periodic patterns which are based on 2D plane (wallpaper patterns and frieze patterns) and 3D plane (crystal patterns) [7].

5 Wallpaper Patterns

One of the periodic patterns which are based on 2D plane is wallpaper patterns. Wallpaper patterns are involved with the patterns which repeat along two linearly independent directions to tile the plane. Wallpaper patterns consists 17 types of patterns [8]. One of these patterns can be found in all over-patterns of isolated motif or full designed songket.

6 Frieze Patterns

A frieze pattern is an infinite strip with a repeating pattern and it can also be called as border pattern [9]. In architecture, the term “frieze” refers to a decorative carving or pattern that runs horizontally just below a roofline or ceiling. Frieze pattern consists of seven types, and several of these patterns can be found in the border pattern in songket [10, 11]. There are seven different frieze groups, as displayed in Table 28.1.

Table 28.1 Seven types of frieze patterns in songket design
Full size table

7 Wallpaper Pattern and Frieze Patterns in Songket (Figs. 28.3, 28.4, 28.5, 28.6, and 28.7)

Fig. 28.3
figure 3

Wallpaper pattern (badan kain) rotations and reflections type cmm

Full size image
Fig. 28.4
figure 4

Frieze patterns (kepala kain) translation type 11

Full size image
Fig. 28.5
figure 5

Frieze patterns (kaki kain) translation type 1

Full size image
Fig. 28.6
figure 6

Wallpaper patterns (badan kain) rotations with reflections type p4m – fold rotation centers lie on reflection axes

Full size image
Fig. 28.7
figure 7

Frieze patterns (pengapit kepala kain) translation and 180° rotation type 12

Full size image

8 Conclusion

Based on the analysis of s ongket patterns in Figs. 28.5 and 28.6, there are rotations and reflection types of pattern on the badan kain. The repetition of rotations and reflection type cmm and p4m are parts of wallpaper patterns. We could see the repetition of translation type 11 in both frieze patterns at kaki kain and kepala kain. The analyses of songket patterns had shown the existence of wallpaper patterns and frieze patterns in the Malay traditional songket design. Therefore, the outcome of this paper is to verify that songket patterns are mainly repeated in both classifications of frieze and wallpaper patterns. These patterns can be found in “badan kain” area, pengapit badan kain, kepala kain, and at kaki kain. It is interesting to identify them at a mathematical classification (in terms of symmetry groups) of repeated patterns into finitely countable classes in which very few researchers had studied on the local textile especially in songket. Furthermore the motifs of weaving songket are traditionally composed of geometrical pattern, and the research on geometry of songket textiles is involved with the motifs’ composition. Therefore, it is essential to fill the gap of the lack of geometry and symmetry research particularly on the elements of songket pattern design.