Week Seven: A Peek Into The Process
This week we had the honor of my mother-in-law visiting Guatemala. She and I have this tiny thing with textile so her time here was the perfect excuse to revisit my favorite markets and to discover some new ones. Since we only had a few days, our time was mostly spent in Antigua and Lake Atitlan, where I got to introduce her to some members of the cooperatives I work with and find some new designs that will certainly be making their way into Collection Two.
It also ended up being an opportunity to share how I form my business partnerships, develop Ara Collective products and work with Mayan weavers to blend their traditional designs with modern style. Since this is where and how Collection One was developed, here’s a little sneak peek of that process via my handy iPhone (Collection One will be hitting the Shop in June.)
Beautiful Lake Atitlan, surrounded by three volcanoes and dotted with twelve weaving villages. Always a source of inspiration and a continual learning place for age-old Mayan weaving, dying and design techniques.
The majority of transportation to each village on the lake is via boat ferries, providing a little tour of the villages and breath-taking views.
Every partnership and design found has started with wandering streets and marketplaces and inquiring about the pieces found, the creative process and the makers.
Originally, vibrant and distinct textile designs were developed in Guatemala to decorate clothing and utility cloth, such as shirts (“huipiles”), skirts (“cortes”), belts (“fajas”), men’s pants (“pantalones”) and heavy panels of cloth (“tzute”) to carry their babies or bundle up on cold nights. Today, those textiles are still being worn but are also used on bags, clutches, pillows, etc. When I find a swatch, piece of clothing or panel of cloth I like, I can then locate where the design is being made and work with local weavers to change the colors and how the design is applied for the modern home.
While many weavers now source their threads from industrial markets, some areas of Guatemala are still using the process of natural dying using local plants, seeds, nuts and other forged materials.
Locally sourced cotton is cleaned, brushed and spun into thread. It is then meticulously strung on to a backstrap loom, which is tied to a post on one end and wrapped around a woman’s waist on the other. Using a series of wood palettes, designs memorized by generations of weavers are woven and brocaded into a “lienzo”, similar to a yard of fabric.
The back side of a brocaded design on a backstrap loom.
The front side of a brocaded design on a backstrap loom, applied to an Ara Collective pillow coming in June.