Three Iowa State textiles and clothing professors will journey to Terengganu, Malaysia during spring break to meet with business, government and museum officials.

LuAnn Gaskill, associate professor, Mary Littrell, professor and chair, and Sara Kadolph, associate professor, will visit Iowa’s sister state March 6-19 and discuss the effect of globalization on the design, production and marketing of Malaysian textiles.

Janet Heinicke, chair of the art department at Simpson College and the president of Iowa Sister State Organization, will accompany them. Heinicke has been to Malaysia a number of occasions and invited the three ISU professors to go because “she was aware of the expertise that we have in marketing and textiles,” Gaskill said.

“The main purpose [of our trip] is to investigate two textile products that are of significant importance to the Malaysian economy,” Gaskill said.

Songket, one of the two products, Kadolph described as a metallic brocade, which is a woven-in design pattern formed either by changing the color of yarn or by changing the interlacing patterns.

Batik, the other product, is a resistant dying process, Kadolph said. In batik, the fabric is printed with wax and then the fabric is dipped into a dye bath. Everything not printed with wax is colored.

The material is taken out of the bath, the wax is stripped off and a new layer of wax is applied in preparation for dipping the material in another color. The process is repeated as many times as needed to create the desired pattern.

Kadolph said the process is not used often because it is very labor intensive.

Terengganu, Malaysia is “one of the places in the world known for these techniques,” Kadolph said.

Littrell said she is glad they have the opportunity to go as a team because each of the professors has a different area of expertise.

Littrell said she personally focuses on marketing, while Kadolph is more involved in production and Gaskill is interested in small businesses.

She said working together creates a more integrated, interdisciplinary approach to their research.

“This is a great opportunity to do exactly what the university has been working on,” Littrell said, since the university has been encouraging interdisciplinary research.

Kadolph said she personally has three goals for her trip to Malaysia. She said she will be working with museums “in terms of conservation of these textiles.”

She also wants to get a better understanding in terms of the production process and to explore quality assurance practices, which she said are a general term for “how a company decides what’s good enough to sell and what’s not.”

For Littrell, the trip will be returning to an old home. She said she lived in Malaysia for 14 months while teaching at a university 10 years ago.

Littrell said Malaysia is an “exciting place to be.” The part of Malaysia they are visiting is on the east coast, where more textiles are produced, she said.

Littrell said she also worked for the Malaysian Handicraft Development Corporation in marketing textiles for tourists and for export. She said she is excited to get back to see how things are now, as the team will be visiting places during its trip where she lived and worked.

The team will spend a day at Universiti Pertanian in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur to meet with faculty there and share ideas about small business and entrepreneurship in the future of the textile field and as a potential direction for their program. Gaskill said they will give the faculty critiques of their program.

Littrell said the College of Family and Consumer Sciences has been focusing on expanding its study abroad opportunities, so they will look into whether Malaysia could be another site to send students.