Weaving

Part of the mission of our language school is to teach us about Mayan culture while we learn spanish. Many of the teachers are Mayan, and they organize loads of informative events. Earlier this week, there was a speaker about Mayan cosmovision, a movie about the civil war in Guatemala, and an expedition to a see local weavers in action. The brightly colored woven cloth is famous, and we got to see how they make it.

It's super labor-intensive, like most things here. The weavers set up in a big field, with wheelbarrows full of long skeins of cotton thread. Then they stretch out the skeins, which are about half as long as a playing field, and organize them with what look like big combs. They count all the threads, and divide them evenly between the teeth of the big combs. They they paint the threads with natural dyes. First everything gets striped with black, and then the gaps between the black stripes get filled in with different colors.









Once the threads are dyed, they get taken over to the weavers, who are usually in the same family as the dyers, and they set up their giant looms to weave the cloth. We visited a weaving house, and got to see them in action. Here's a short movie of the weavers in action:




I even got to try my hand at the loom!! Here's a terrible picture of me trying to figure out how to do it - the weavers made it look so easy!! Apparently I was really lucky to get to try it out - our guide said he'd never seen them let anyone else take a go at the loom before.