Different cultures across the Pacific, Tonga, Fiji and Eastern Papua for example, have developed diverse methods and distinctive styles of decorating and using the cloth. Young plants are cut when they're 8 to 10 months old. The strips of fibre are placed on a wooden anvil which looks like a low stool. Women beat the fibre on the anvil with wooden clubs, beating and folding it repeatedly until it is almost half a metre wide.
Pieces are then overlapped and beaten at the joints to form larger pieces.
The white cloth is dried in the sun. The cloth can be smoked over a sugarcane fire to produce the tan-coloured masi kuvui . It can be soaked in a dye bath. Dyes include mangrove sap, terracotta clay and specially prepared soot. The sharply defined, repetitive, black, brown and white patterns of Fiji's masi are among our strongest visual memories of the arts of Fiji.