Balita is the Tagalog word for “News,” and describes a hand-weaving technique using newspaper strips and glue to make intricate pieces. A banig is a traditional East Asian or Filipino hand-woven mat for sitting or sleeping made from palm or seagrass leaves. In this workshop, graduating artist Nikki Natnat will guide participants through the paper weaving technique used in banig mats, and her work in the 404 ERROR exhibition. Her project, Carried, uses the balita hand-weaving technique to create a wearable backpack, a way to honour her Middle-Eastern heritage and Canadian background, physically carrying her culture and bloodline with her wherever she goes.

See a recording of the workshop below.

Old newspapers/ Recycled paper (the bigger the better)
Scissors
Ruler, pencil (optional)
Glue stick

1. Prepare the paper material first by either folding the newspaper into thin strips or using a ruler and pencil to mark 1/2 inch lines across the longest dimension of your paper (if your paper is 8 x 11," mark the lines following the direction of the 11” side).

2. After measuring, cut out the marked lines or folds to create pieces of newspaper strips. Do not worry about making them all equal in width, however, the closest they are the better!

3. Optional: If you would like a challenge and create a larger banig piece at the end, you may alter the length of the paper by gluing the ends of two or more paper strips together to create longer ones.

4. Once your paper strips are ready, the weaving begins, this process will only require folding! First start off by taking one paper strip and folding it side to side in the centre. Then take the right side of the strip and fold that side downwards to the front, so that the edge of the right strip is flushed against the fold you marked at the center. Your strip should now look like a geometric number 7.

5. Next, you want to do this same fold on the left side of the strip but instead of folding it down to the front, you fold it downwards towards the back. Now your strip should have a triangular ‘head’ with two little strips as its ‘legs’ one leading from the back and the other at the front. REMEMBER: Left back, Right front!

6. Now take a new paper strip and insert it perpendicularly between the two ‘leg’ strips. Your two strips together should look like a capital T with a small triangle on its head. That triangle is the first corner of your piece.

7. Here’s the trickiest and most foundational part, once you get this, you can understand the rest of the process to finish your banig. While keeping the second strip tightly against the base of the triangle, you want to fold the left side of the new strip the same way you folded the left side of the first strip. So if you folded it down towards the back, fold the left side of that second strip to the back as well and vice versa. Try to maintain the same angle of your folds so it’s consistent with the corner you made. Your piece should now have four leg strips.

8. From here on, you need to take all the odd strips and fold it up (strip 1 and strip 3), before you lay out a new strip perpendicularly across the piece. This allows you to keep track of the back-and-front layers also recognized as the ‘checkered’ pattern used in most basic weaving techniques. Keep the strips tightly flushed against each other to maintain a clean pattern.

9. Then, take the ends of the third strip and repeat Step 7 folding the two strips downwards following the same pattern and then to Step 8 to keep track of the back-and-forth pattern. Keep repeating this until you are satisfied with the size of the top half of your final piece. If you want it larger, then you can always add more length to the ends of the strips by doing Step 3.

10. Now that you roughly have an unfinished triangle with two arms and many legs! This next foundational step is important to finish the rest of your banig. Take the left arm strip and fold it in the OPPOSITE way you would have folded the left side. So, fold the left strip forwards instead of backwards. In the same way, you would fold the right strip backwards instead of forwards. The other main difference is that you would fold both strips inwards so that they would weave into the existing leg strips. This creates your two side corners. Keep repeating this pattern until you are left with only two little strips at the very end.

11. Once you see your square banig forming you can tuck or cut away any excess strips that are sticking out and can easily tuck the ending strips into a triangle to create your last corner. You may use a glue stick to glue in any imperfections.

Nikki Natnat is a multimedia artist, performer, and CCIT and Art & Art History student. Her artistic journey started in elementary school in her home in Doha, Qatar. After moving to Canada in 2011, Natnat trained in various media in high school. Over the years, Natnat’s passion for art and community has developed through her experience being a leader, teaching youth art at the City of Mississauga, co-directing her high school’s Visual Arts Council, and organizing an intergenerational event in collaboration with her community’s local senior artists. Currently, Natnat co-directs Artespace, a new company that focuses on providing safe platforms for emerging artists. She actively shares her work and process on Instagram (@maybenixtime), and sticks to Swizz Beatz’s message that: “there is no wrong way of doing art.”