Discover the Remarkable Process of Turning Pineapple Leaves into Beautiful Fabric

In PieceWork’s Winter 2025 issue featuring traditional dress from several cultures, Angela Crenshaw writes about the significance of garments made from pineapple cloth in the Philippines. As a companion article, Kathleen Bennet focuses on the fiber itself, explaining the steps involved from picking the leaves to weaving the cloth.

Piña Cloth Tradition

Considered a native of South America, the pineapple was brought to the Philippines by Spanish colonists around 1565. Using techniques perfected centuries before the arrival of the Spanish, Filippino people made the plant their own when they created beautiful fabrics from the fine fibers extracted from within the leaves of the red or “wild” pineapple (Ananas bractaeus or Ananas comosus var. bracteatus).

Before the Spanish arrived, clothing was made from abacá, the native banana tree (Musa textilis). The fibers were removed from leaves, cleaned, dried, and individually knotted rather than spun. These strands of knotted fibers were then woven into durable clothing. After the Spanish introduced the pineapple, local weavers quickly discovered that pineapple leaves contained fibers that were finer and more delicate than the traditional abacá. When woven, these pineapple fibers produced a fabric that was translucent, with a natural golden sheen that became a part of traditional Filipino cultural heritage for centuries. Light and fine, piña fabric was later exported to Europe as a rare and expensive textile.

From Leaf to Thread

Piña is still made by hand today. The process involves several steps:

• Pag-ani: Three to five leaves are pulled from the plant base and the thorny leaf edges are removed by pulling them away from the leaf, just as one might remove the strings from green beans. Prior to harvesting the leaves, the fruits may be removed to encourage the leaves to grow longer.
• Pagkiue: A single leaf is laid faceup on a long board or mat, with the base placed farthest away. The fresh leaves are scraped with the rounded edge of a broken ceramic plate to expose the bastos (coarse fibers), which are pulled out and reserved for making a thick thread used for mats, headwear, or stiff cloth. The leaf is scraped again, this time using a coconut shard to expose the linuan (fine fibers), which are lifted up using a pointed pick and gently pulled away from the leaf.

Scraping a pineapple leaf, 2021. Photo courtesy of Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan

• Paghugas: Leaf bundles of the fine linuan fibers are held together, combed, and handwashed in cool water. The fresh fibers clean easily and do not need degumming.
• Pagtuyo: After washing, the bundles of fibers are hung on a rack to dry.
• Pagpisi and Paganug-ot: One by one, the individual fibers are knotted. Each knot is trimmed using either a tigawnan (bamboo stick) or hayuma (sharp bamboo blade). The tinagak (lengthening strand) is coiled into a basket or kueon (clay pot).

Instructions for tying the pineapple fiber threads. First, cross the left (red) fiber over the right (black), then form a loop in the lower part of the right fiber. Bring that loop over the left (red) fiber and loop itself (black fiber). Pull the lower part of the loop up and over the top of the (red) fiber and gently pull on both sides of the black fiber to lock the knot. Illustration by Kathleen Bennett, 2025

• Pagtalinuas: The coiled threads are carefully hand-wound on bobbins using a tabun-ak (reed diz) and strung onto a warping board, then fastened to a double-treadle loom ready for weaving.
• Paghaboe: Both men and women weave the piña cloth using a double-treadle loom with an overhead warp. Piña fibers may be woven with silk or cotton to create a less expensive fabric.

A sample of piña-silk cloth. Note the knot on the unraveled strand. Photo by Kathleen Bennett, 2025

Villagers involved in producing piña often specialize after trying different steps in the process; sometimes they work alone, but more often they join a small work group of scrapers, knotters, or weavers, specializing in a specific step in the process of creating the finished fabric.

Some piña fabric is decorated on the loom as the weaving progresses in a process called suk-suk, sinuksok, or suk-sukor. Plain woven piña is embroidered by hand with silk or cotton using a variety of techniques, including pulled thread, appliqué, whitework, and chain stitch.

Embedded content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRvWiiGoOzI The whole process, from picking the leaves to weaving the fabric.

Alternative Processing Methods

Where the traditional piña is a single strand of knotted fibers pulled from fresh leaves, pineapple floss is extracted from the dried and semi-dried leaves left behind during commercial processing of sweet pineapples (Ananas comosus). In a mechanized or semi-mechanized process similar to producing other cellulosic fibers such as flax, the pineapple leaves are soaked (retted), stripped, degummed, washed, and sometimes treated.

Example of piña fiber produced from pineapple waste. Photo by Kathleen Bennett, courtesy of The Fiber Garden

Some leaves are commercially processed into felt or fabric. Fiber for handspinning is also available, but it will not produce the same superfine threads as the traditional handknotted process.

--Kathleen Bennett

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Resources

• Aquilizan, Alfredo, and Aquilizan, Isabel. “Pina: Weaving Filipio fibre into the world.” Garland Magazine, G25, December 1, 2021. garlandmag.com/article/pina-weaving-philippines-fibre-into-the-world. Accessed September 3, 2025.
• Blakely, Julia. “The prickly meanings of the pineapple.” Unbound, Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, 2021. blog.library.si.edu/blog/2021/01/28/the-prickly-meanings-of-the-pineapple. Accessed September 21, 2025.
• The Fiber Garden. fibergarden.com.
• Hellmuth, N. “Did the Aztec and Maya really have the pineapple before the arrival of the Spaniards?” FLAAR Mesoamerica, 2018. maya-ethnobotany.org. Accessed September 21, 2025.
• Raquel’s Piña Cloth. “Women of Piña: Tying generations, one woman to another.” raquelspinacloth.com/blogs/womens-month/tying-generations-one-woman-to-another. Accessed September 15, 2025.
• Sunio, P. Fame+. “The art of Philippine embroidery.” fameplus.com/touchpoint/the-art-of-philippine-embroidery. Accessed September 15, 2025.

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Learn more about the Philippine’s gorgeous embroidered piña fabric in PieceWork’s Winter 2025 issue.