Quest for Fiber—Quechua Weaving
I visited Michell’s mill today where they have a museum, Mundo Alpaca, dedicated to alpaca fiber and the milling process. I will post more about that on another day, but today, I got a little infactuated with the traditional Quechua weaving demonstration. Each month Michell employs two women from fair-trade organizations in the Cusco area to demonstrate their craft for museum visitors.
I sat down beside this beautiful woman and watched her work for a little over an hour. We spoke little: I told her in my broken Spanish that my Spanish is very poor, and she replied that hers was too. Her principle language is Quechua. We laughed.
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1 thought on “Quest for Fiber: Quechua Weaving”
Cathy,
Thanks. Reminds me of when I learned backstrap weaving from Mayan Indians in Guatemala in the winters of 1976 and 1978. It took me 4 hours to weave about 1 inch. I still have one of the weavings I created in San Lucas de Toliman, a town in the highlands of Guatemala. One of my teachers was the best multi-tasker I have ever seen in my life. She taught and oversaw 2 gringos weaving, cooked dinner, cared for her kids, took care of the chickens, talked to neighbors, tended the cooking fire, and more all at the same time. One time a chicken landed on and into the weaving I had been working on for 2 weeks. My panic disappeared when she shooed it away without missing a step on her other tasks. At the time of those trips in the 1970s, as I told you, I had hoped to go to South America to learn weaving there, but I had so much fun in Guatemala that I stayed in Central America. But I read back then that some of the best weaving in the world has been done in the highlands of South America.