How to Make the 갈옷. Part 2.

To make the 갈옷, you need fabric to dye. Lots of it. Cotton takes the persimmon juice color very well, and it is very comfy to wear around. Here we are unloading the fresh cotton from the van. Each of these bags is filled with several rolls of white cotton. Each roll is approximately one meter wide and varies in length between 10 and 30 meters.
First things first, the cotton must be washed. Each roll gets unrolled and soaked in clean water.
Truth be told anybody can do the cotton washing part. But if you have ready access to some ajummas, they will do the work for dirt cheap. And they are a bowl of laughter to have around. Note: the ajumma costume is optional, but you'd be hard pressed to hire a country woman who didn't show up to work in it.

After soaking and rinsing the cotton rolls, hang them up to dry. We just hung them in the yard haphazardly over some ropes that were held up by bamboo poles. It is not required to dry the cotton in this way. Feel free to use a laundry spinner to spin off excess water, but you don't want to use a clothes dryer or artificial heat of any kind. It certainly never appeared to me to be the most efficient method of drying long rolls of cotton, but as with most things in life, the process is often more important than the result.

Tangent: that tree in the background is a 무화과 tree (fig tree?). The fruit looks terrible and messy as it falls to the ground. But once the Master convinced me to try it, I found it delicious.