here, there, everywhere

Having been around weavers and their weavings for two months now, I'm probably quite late in posting these photos. Not being even remotely able to weave myself (despite the best efforts of the Quechua woman who 'taught' me to weave a hideously orange bracelet that will not be pictured here nor anywhere else), I am a bit in awe of the ability of so many people here to make the incredibly detailed weavings you saw in the last post out of an indistinguishable pile of string. 

Most weavings here are done using a backstrap loom, which hooks one side around a tree or post (or stick, as is the case below) and the other side around the weaver's waist so that you can sit down and weave wherever you like. Most tourists who try it this position for the first time find it pretty uncomfortable, and not surprisingly, many of the weavers suffer from related back problems. 

The part that's hardest for me to wrap my mind around is the way the entire design is determined by the setup of the loom - which mean the weaver has to decide exactly how everything's going to look before she even starts weaving. The chalina above, by the way, is one of the only times I ever saw any sort of preparatory notes accompanying a project (though how awesome is a checkerboard scarf of llamas?!) 

Our NGO offers weaving lessons in one of the communities they work with - when tourists go up to nearbye Patacancha for a weaving lesson, this bracelet above is the type of thing they end up weaving. I went up fairly early on in our time here, and was pretty glad to gain an appreciation of what goes into weaving early on. 

above: Cipriana, the weaver who got stuck teaching me. Sorry, Cipriana. 

It took me one and a half bracelets to even begin to grasp what Cipriana was trying to show me. In my defense, the lesson is largely non-verbal, with only a few Spanish words thrown in - the weavers speak primarily Quechua, so my first time weaving was also the first chance I had to hear what Quechua actually sounds like, as the weaving teachers chatted amongst themselves and we tried to make sense of the string in our laps (I'm pretty sure I heard Quechua for Hey guys, I got the dumb one!). By the end of the second bracelet we made, I had a faint idea of the procedure, but there's no way I could do it on my own. I'd like to be able to someday. 

(For now, I still prefer watching other people weave, or learn to weave).