This year the featured country was Peru and while it's taken me a couple weeks to put everything together, it's finally here! This year I was only able to stay one day at the festival and of course found myself pretty much stuck in the textile tents, there were other exhibits, I know there were, but I could barely see them over the awesomeness of the extremely talented textile artists who were being featured and their beautiful work! At some point I was made to go eat food in the wonderfully air conditioned Museum of the American Indian, which conveniently housed the festival marketplace in its atrium. Of course there was a display right at the front of amazing yarn. I may have taken ages to pick the perfect skein and it's beautiful! I don't have a pattern for it yet and still have to figure out exactly what the yardage is, but this plum colored giant hank of fingering weight wool is destined to become a beautiful shawl and it'll probably take me a year to decide on which one!
Of course it's never enough to just talk about beautiful textiles, there must be pictures of them as well! I was lucky to be able to photograph several of the artists and dance performers and am doing my best to credit them appropriately.
My first stop was in the Cusco Textiles Tent. In here the emphasis was on traditional types of handweaving.
Quitina Huanca Quispe (left) is both a weaver and a singer and Epifania Choque Quispe (right) is a weaver and a farmer. Both are demonstrating traditional forms of handweaving. Their work is rolled up beneath the unwoven surface as it progresses. The knowledge is passed down generally speaking from one generation of women to the next. I could have sat all day watching Quitina and almost did before I was pulled away to watch some of the musicians performing near by.
Working beside these ladies was Timoteo Ccarita Sacaca. He is largely self taught and is enthusiastic about explaining his work. One of many moments where I wished my Spanish was better as hearing his story in his words is always better than working through a translator.
Timoteo explained his work as an extension of the traditional processes. His designs are based largely on traditional motifs, but also include references to colonialism. The inspiration for these comes from all around him and he charts out the images in his mind, keeping them there as he weaves. Considering I can't even manage cable charting without a physical pattern in front of me, he has my immense respect for his talent and sheer skill!
A couple tents over was a separate demonstration area that focused on the creation and dying of the yarns used in the various forms of textile creation. There I got to sit at the feet of Leandra Gutiérrez Sallo as she worked on some truly awe worthy color work.
She was gracious enough to let me interrupt her knitting to ask her about her colorwork technique. Assuming I understood her correctly, it takes her nearly a month to finish a project like the one she currently has in her hands. In yet another example of me wishing that my Spanish was better I finally had to call over the translator because as it turns out, I never learned knitting terminology in any language other than English. This ended up being an amusing exchange as two knitters talked through a translator and then I had to stop and explain to that very translator the purpose of DPNs and why she would be using them, and what the parts of the yarn dying process further back in the tent were. I was very much hoping to glean some color-work pro secret of not getting the yarn all tangled up, but Leandra said that it's just simply constantly untangling and trying to keep the yarns as neat as you can as you go along. The snarled mass of my current colorwork pattern in the design stages would probably make her weep in it's messiness.
I don't pretend to know much about weaving though I have friends who are weavers and so their work is still largely "and magic happens" to me, but I was very excited to find another knitter and loved how that immediate connection was made when she realized that I actually understood what she was doing and wasn't just a random curious bystander. Leandra's work is absolutely stunning and I wish I had had a better list of questions on me to ask her about her patterns, design, and technique, but I was so easily distracted by the beauty of the finished projects themselves.
Behind her in the tent was the whole process of yarn dying and had I not seen Leandra sitting there knitting away, I could have spent a very long time indeed in that part of the tent! I got to show Littlest Owl the process from a demonstrator holding a hank of undyed yarn to the dying kettle and the various ingredients in the tent. She was offered to be able to stir the contents of the kettle, but she declined. I, however, happily took the demonstrator up on her offer!
For this particular yarn the dye source comes from a type of lichen. Arrayed then on a near-by table was a series of other dye sources with the yarns that they would produce and a couple mordants.
There was yet another tent that had some fiber awesomeness going on in it, but I unfortunately didn't get to go in, left to my own devices I would have seen little else at the festival other than fiber and textiles! However, of course, there was much more to learn from and see and so here are some of the other sights of the day.
Dancers performing several of the atajo de negritos dances that is one of the Afro-Peruvian cultural dance expressions that celebrate local religion and culture while also making commentary on the effects of slavery and colonialism.
A contradanza troupe providing a glimpse into La Fiesta de la Virgen del Carmen. The festival has several groups of dancers who each perform a different part of the story and history of Paucartambo. This particular performance makes colonial references both in its subject matter and in the music itself. As in many of the other dance styles included in the Folklife Festival, this particular one serves as a reminder and commentary on a history that includes ancient traditions and European colonial ambitions.
Other demonstration areas included farming (with lots of information on quinoa), woodworking, reed boat building, story telling, cooking, more dance styles, visual art, and more. If you are looking to come visit DC during the summer, please make a point of looking up the Folklife Festival dates for that year, it's worth making the trip!
So sad I didn't make this year's festival. Thank you so much for covering the yarn so well. I am fascinated by that dying process.
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