Kapa

Kapa is a fabric made by native Hawaiians from the bast fibres of certain species of trees and shrubs in the orders Rosales and Malvales.

Similar to tapa found elsewhere in Polynesia (the Hawaiian phoneme /k/ corresponds to /t/ in most other Polynesian languages), kapa differs in the methods used in its creation.

Wauke (Broussonetia papyrifera) was the preferred source of bast fibres for kapa, but it was also made from ʻulu (Artocarpus altilis),[4] ōpuhe (Urera spp.

),[5] maʻaloa (Neraudia melastomifolia),[6] māmaki (Pipturus albidus),[7] ʻākala (Rubus hawaiensis), ʻākalakala (R. macraei), and hau (Hibiscus tiliaceus).

Another way to carve the kapa is by starting on the four-sided affairs, with the coarsest grooves on one side used first in breaking down the bast, or wet bark.

Alphonse Pellion, Îles Sandwich; Maisons de Kraïmokou, Premier Ministre du Roi; Fabrication des Étoffes (c. 1819), Depicting High Chiefess Likelike , the wife of Kalanimoku beating kapa cloth.
Hawaiian kapa, 18th century, Cook-Foster Collection at Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany