Most of the wool that Awamaki weavers work with is shorn from their own sheep and alpaca. Llama wool is also used, but being very coarse it is used only for utilitarian items such as sacks, ropes and horse blankets.
Alpaca fiber
The alpaca belongs to a family of mammals called camelids, and is directly descended from the vicuña, the smallest and most graceful of the camelids. Also bearing the finest fleece of all camelids the vicuña was considered sacred to the Inca and hunted to near extinction after the Spanish Conquest. Although vicuña are no longer endangered, the harvesting of its highly sought-after fleece is tightly controlled and can only be carried out every few years through sanctioned chacu – communal efforts to herd the wild animals and shear their wool. Bearing a similarly fine fleece, but yielding much more wool than the vicuña, the alpaca was domesticated purely for the purpose of harvesting its fiber. Alpaca fiber is much finer than sheep fiber, making it softer and also warmer. Alpaca does also not contain the oil lanolin, making it hypoallergenic and ideal for children or people with sensitive skin.
Sheep fiber
Until the Spanish Conquest alpaca fleece was the primary source of fiber for weaving into cloth in Peru. However, with the arrival of the Spanish and the introduction of sheep in the 16th century, sheep have since replaced alpaca as the primary fiber animals in the Andes. Sheep fiber is thicker than alpaca fiber, making it more durable and less susceptible to pilling. Sheep fiber also contains lanolin, which affords it some degree of impermeability against water. The great majority of traditional Quechua clothing is now woven with sheep wool, while alpaca wool is reserved for special or ceremonial items.
Washing and Spinning
After shearing, the raw wool is washed and spun into yarn using the ph’uska, or Andean drop spindle. Sheeps wool must be washed before spinning in order to get rid of the lanolin. Traditionally the fleece would have been washed with the roots of the plant Sacha Paraquy (Nyctaginaceae), combined with the suds produced after rinsing quinoa grains. Nowadays it is washed with normal household detergent. Alpaca and llama wool, not having lanolin, are only washed after spinning, before being woven.
The finer the fiber is desired, the smaller and lighter the spindle used. It takes years of practice to master the delicate technique of spinning the thin, strong threads necessary for high-quality weavings. Alpaca can be spun more finely than sheep wool, and for both animals, the quality of the yarn depends on the age of the animal and the part of the animal from which the wool was shorn. After the initial spinning of raw wool into yarn, the wool is spun several more times into very strong two- or even three-ply yarn that can withstand the tension and tugging that is required to create a fine, tightly-woven textile.
Traders have been bringing synthetic dyes to rural communities in Peru for at least 50 to 100 years, and Quechua weavers now weave the majority of the cloth that they make for themselves and their families with yarn that is synthetically dyed. While this change makes sense economically and aesthetically for Quechua people, traditional Andean knowledge about using natural materials for dyes is at risk of being lost.
Awamaki runs natural-dye workshops with its weavers, and all of Awamaki’s textiles are woven with yarn that is dyed using native plants and insects. The recuperation of this knowledge among the weavers of the Patacancha Valley has been one of the principal successes of the project.
Traditional Quechua textiles are made on a backstrap loom. Unlike the looms with which many Westerners are familiar that have a rigid frame, backstrap looms are comprised of two sticks across which the warp is stretched. One of these sticks is attached to a fixed object, or held in place by a stake in the ground. The other stick is attached to the weaver via a strap around the back. The weaver can adjust the tension on the weaving by leaning forward or backward. One of the major advantages of a backstrap loom is that it is portable. Quechua women are able to roll up the weaving they are working on and take it with them as they care for their herds of alpaca, sheep and llama, or take their work with them when they go to visit friends or relatives. One of the limitations to using a backstrap loom is that the width of the weaving is limited by how far the weaver can reach with her hands. In order to make wider pieces, Quechua weavers join together two smaller weavings.
Weaving with a backstrap loom produces a double faced weaving in which the pattern is the same on both sides, but the colors are reversed. Patterns, or pallay, are produced by picking up warp threads of various colors to create the pattern. For more information on pallay, read on.
Andean weaving includes a rich tradition of iconography. The designs and motifs used in Quechua textiles are passed down from generation to generation and are repeated over and over again in the weavings. Each pallay (or design) has an important meaning for the weaver, although the meanings attributed to each pallay may vary between regions and villages. Each weaver chooses how to use the multitudes of pallays that she knows in each of her pieces.
The textile designs are based on the daily lives of the Quechua weavers. They are inspired by agriculture, flora and fauna of the region, astrological phenomenon, human forms, bodies of water, and geometric designs. Often pallay are loosely based on their inspiration and may show a highly stylized version of the objects or event it is depicting. For example, instead of showing the entire animal, weavers may choose to represent an animal through a footprint. Complicated patterns are made by combining and repeating many different pallay.