Weaving class!

After my morning classes today I headed off to Trama Textiles, a women's cooperative that provides fair wages for their weavings and their teaching. I had gone once to just check out the processes, and I loved it so much that I decided I MUST weave a scarf on a back-strap loom! They say it takes about 10 hours, and I'm not realy sure I have that much time during the week before 5 p.m. but I will MAKE time because it's so cool!

I began the process with debanando, or combining two threads into one ball of yarn. The individual threads are too thin, and this process also allows you to combine colors if you wish. You put the skeins of thread on these spinning wooden contraptions and wind away! It took me 1.5 hours just to debanar 4 colors of string, and I took a break to take a picture with Carlita, the cute little snot-nosed girl running about the shop. She's the daughter of Oralia, who is one of my teachers.

I then moved on to urdir the thread around some wooden pegs, making a certain criss-cross pattern that you need to put it on the loom. For one scarf you need 180 threads (each one is really doubled), and this process took me another hour. I actually went pretty fast because I got a rhythm down, thanks to all my sweatshop work!


I then began the tedious process of amarrando el telar, or setting up the loom. You first put each end on a wooden peg and hang it like a hammock from one end and the other end you strap around your butt. On one end you have to separate each individual thread and group them into groups of 20. Then you do the same to the other end, only not grouping them in groups of 20. THEN, you have to prepart the via dura, or the strong string. In this picture (that is of my teacher working on another girl's scarf), you can see that she pulls the strong orange nylon thread between each string, alternating up and down in your hand, and then she puts it on the small wooden pole. I didn't take pictures of myself doing this step because I was concentrating too hard! I didn't have the right tension at first, so I had to start this step over, but in the end Oralia said it would work and I felt good about having done it myself instead of having it done for me!

All this took 4.5 hours and they had to close. So technically I haven't actually eevn learned how to weave yet, but I will on Tuesday and then I'll only have 7-8 hours to go!