Off to Peru, 2013

Summer in Santa Fe is usually a time of nonstop events, and my favorite of all of these is the International Folk Art Market. Since it began 16 years ago I have worked as a volunteer each July to help out in booths of artisans from all over the world. After going to Peru in 2010 to attend the first Tinkuy and go on the Andean Textile Arts tour, I decided to specify each year that I wanted to work in Nilda Callañaupa’s booth for the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco.

I had time to get to know Nilda better through working with her in her booth in 2011, and she asked me if she could stay at my house the next summer, along with her nephew’s wife, Hilda. It was lovely having personal time with both of them and being able to show them around Santa Fe.

One evening Nilda told me that she was starting to plan the next Tinkuy conference for November of 2013. One of the missions of CTTC is the revitalization of traditional textiles techniques, and one of these is doubleweave. I could hardly believe it when Nilda asked me to come to the Tinkuy and teach a workshop in doubleweave to twenty of her best weavers, two from each of the CTTC communities. I knew right away what an amazing honor this was, but at the same time, what a daunting challenge it would be.

I had only spent a few hours weaving on backstrap looms, both in Peru and Guatemala, and both times on looms that had been prepared for us ahead of time. I would need to become reasonably adept at making backstrap looms and setting them up with prepared doubleweave warps to be shipped to Peru ahead of the conference. My students would be master backstrap weavers whose native language is Quechua, though most of them can speak Spanish as well. My Spanish is moderately functional at best, and my Quechua is nonexistent.

So I began by playing Spanish tapes in my car everywhere I went for the next year. I read every book I could find on pre-Columbian Andean textiles, and while there were plenty of photographs of exquisite examples of doubleweave, I could find no information on how to set up a backstrap loom with the necessary sheds for doubleweave.

I found a weaver from Guatemala in Santa Fe who told me that he knew how to weave doubleweave and he offered to give me lessons. I studied with him for a month or so, and I learned more about setting up and weaving on a backstrap loom, but it turned out that what he was calling doubleweave was a different two-sided structure on a single warp.

I knew that Laverne Waddington, master backstrap weaver living in Bolivia, had done some doubleweave and would be able to help me. I sent her some emails and waited as months went by with no response. It was now July of 2013. I was working with Nilda at the Folk Art Market again and beginning to panic about what I needed to accomplish over the next few months. While writing up tickets in the CTTC booth one day I looked up, and there was Laverne Waddington standing in front of me! It turned out that she had never received my emails, but was in town for a few more days and would be happy to come to my house and show me how to set up backstrap looms for doubleweave. A couple days later with a few hours of patient instruction and demonstration I knew exactly how to do what I needed to do.

I wanted to teach my students in Peru as authentically as I could in the way doubleweave had been done there centuries before. Most doubleweave was done in a fine brown and natural handspun cotton in a technique that is similar to Finnweave. In order to make the project manageable I worked in brown and natural cotton carpet warp and wound 25 warps in pairs of threads. I designed a 4-inch wide sampler on which I could teach how to weave two separate layers, folded cloth, tubular weave, stitched cloth, and especially, doubleweave pickup.

I knew that the weavers in the CTTC communities weave their designs straight out of their heads with nothing drawn out, but the only way that I know how to weave pickup is with my designs drawn on graph paper so that I can follow it and count the threads as I go. I figured that I could show my students how to follow a graph, and then they would take the technique and do it in their own way. I wanted to give them a design that relates to their culture, so I graphed out a design with two llamas facing each other.

I shipped off boxes with a dozen pre-made and warped backstrap looms and another dozen warps that the CTTC staff offered to make into looms. I also sent extra spools of the cotton carpet warp in each color so that I could teach my students how to wind a doubleweave warp and make the backstrap looms with the needed sheds. Then I held my breath. The boxes arrived just fine, but got held up in customs for a couple nerve-wracking weeks. They were finally released with just enough time for the CTTC staff to be able to prepare the extra backstrap looms with the warps I had sent before the opening of the Tinkuy conference.

I hardly had a chance to get excited about going to Peru again because all my focus was on being prepared for my workshop. This time, instead of going on the ATA tour, I joined up with a group of six weaving friends from Oregon to travel after the conference to most of the same places that I had gone on my previous trip.

The 2013 Tinkuy was a much bigger and more international affair that was held in the conference center in the city of Cusco. It began with a festive parade through the center of the city with weavers from each of the communities dancing through the main plaza.

Once at the conference center, some 500 of us gathered in a large room where we were treated to an opening ceremony led by two shamans and leaders from various communities. We had three days of lectures and panel discussions, but unlike the first Tinkuy, we now had headsets and could hear simultaneous translations in the language we selected. Once again, breaks each day gave us time to watch weavers from around the world demonstrate in the open-air courtyard, and evenings were filled with music, dancing, and drop spindle spinning lessons.

For me, of course, the big event was my doubleweave class. It was held in a large open space that had two pillars supporting the room. There were two weavers from each of the ten communities, each in their unique traditional dress. Ten weavers tied up their backstrap looms to each of the pillars and fanned out like spokes of a wheel.

I had asked the CTTC staff to translate my instructions into Spanish, and at first I attempted to explain to them what doubleweave is and how it works using the terminology I had. They just sat and stared at me, and I realized that this wasn’t going to work. So I just sat down, strapped on a loom and started weaving. They got up close and watched what I was doing from various angles, and then sat down and started weaving perfect doubleweave.

I demonstrated each new technique as we got to it in the same way, and each time they took to it like ducks to water. Even when we got to the last section of the sampler and I showed them how to follow the graphed design they understood it immediately and loved weaving their own little llamas. I don’t think I have ever had such fearless and enthusiastic students. They wanted to learn everything they could and didn’t even want to stop for lunch or to leave at the end of the day.

We worked on the samplers for the first two days, and then on the third day I got out the spools of carpet warp. They worked in pairs, each winding two warps, and then each setting up a new backstrap loom with extra heddle bars that I had brought with me.

They were now set to go back to their communities, practice doubleweave, and teach it forward to other weavers.

Once the conference was over I could breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that all had gone well, and enjoy my time traveling with my friends from Oregon. We had another day of natural dyeing in Chinchero, visited other CTTC weaving communities, went to the various Incan sites, and hiked up to the Sun Gate at Machu Picchu.

After our time in the Sacred Valley we flew back to Lima and spent a couple days there before heading home again. The highlight was a visit to the Amano Museum, an outstanding collection of pre-Columbian textiles and ceramics that had been amassed by a Japanese businessman, Yoshitaro Amano. At that time the museum was open only by appointment, and we had the collection to ourselves for a couple hours. Doris Robles, the museum director, gave us a private tour and allowed us to pull out any of their sliding drawers and photograph the textiles. I could have spent days there, just with the doubleweave textiles alone.

I returned home feeling like I had just had the most rewarding experience of my life. I could hardly wait to see where my students would take doubleweave in the future.