Selling in Xela December 21st

We participated in the touristic celebration of the closing of 13 Bak'tun in Xela for 5 days of selling in the beautiful garden of the Town Hall. What an experience! We met lots of people, and were successful in selling our products. This photo was taken by a photographer from a website that is promoting tourism to Guatemala, gt7.es/visitaguate. Of course, this was a tourism-inspired celebration of what was an important sacred day for many of us Maya, the changing to a new era of the long count calendar. This happens only once in more than 3000 years. In Cajola there were celebrations in each of the sacred sites. Though we enjoyed our participation in the Xela event, it is important not to confuse the commercial with the sacred, as you know!

Come visit MayaMam Weavers

We are pleased to say we finally have a sign announcing our location! Now that we are so easy to find we hope to have more visitors. We are in the process of designing a new style of fabric for a cooperative project in Mazatenango, when they come to see the samples they will easily find us this time. And of course we invite any of you who come to Guatemala to visit us in the new year. We will be finishing our work year tomorrow with our year end inventory, then we are on vacation until the 2nd of January. Happy New Year -- and Best Wishes as we change to a new era in our Long Count Calendar,

at midnight tonight!

MayaMam Weavers and Oxlajuj B'aktun

We are entering into the last days of Oxlajuj B'aktun. What this truly means for us Maya is that we are finalizing one Long Count calendar of more than 5000 years and beginning a new one. There are many prophecies that talk about what will happen during the transition to the new era. The most important (in our opinion) is that the change of calendar will usher in a positive change for humanity, that we will be living peacefully as brothers and sisters throughout the world. Wouldn't that be incredible! And for us here in our group, it also means we will be participating in a big event in Xela, 4 days of celebrations with the opportunity to sell our products. This week we are busy getting ready!

We Can Weave It

We are always pleased to receive special requests and custom orders. Someone sees our work and asks us to do something similar but in their own colors, or design, or product. Recently we were asked to weave a "Julia Chang" headband. Now, really, we don't even know who or what is Julia Chang, but we always enjoy that kind of challenge. Here is a picture of the headband fthat we wove for our client. This is definitely a contemporary interpretation of our traditional weaving!

Weaving Colors into New Scarves

We are having such great success with our gossamer weave scarves that we are enjoying weaving new designs nearly every other week! We have just launched one on Etsy that is completely rainbow stripes, in others we have inserted just slivers of rainbow stripes. We will try to get several more new designs onto Etsy in the next week or so!

From Superstorm Sandy to Earthquakes -- Still Weaving!

We have not been posting for the last several weeks due to complications in life, but mostly due to Superstorm Sandy in NJ and Guatemala's 7.5 earthquake of last week. The good news here in Cajola is that no one lost their life. About 125 houses were damaged -- about 20 of these were completely destroyed. With outside assistance the houses are being be rebuilt. The earthquake was very scarey, it was even impossible to walk because the earth was moving so much. Our children were frightened and remain frightened through the aftershocks. But, thankfully, we are back at work weaving, sewing, and embroidering.

The foot loom weavers started the second stage of their training. As always in weaving, the hardest part is the preparation. Here we are threading the sticks -- forty of them -- that we will use to weave the elaborate figures on the foot loom that are woven on the backstrap loom. Stay tuned!

See what we can weave now!

We have been working for nearly two months with master weaver Don Oscar Boj. We have been learning a lot! The most exciting for us is that we have learned how to read weaving drafts, thread our looms in different ways, and thus how to create many different designs. We have been taking notes (that is something new for us, too, since most of us have not had been able to go to school...) and we will be able to build upon this training forever. Here is an example of our new capabilities. We can really envision lots of new weaves. Next week we will begin the second phase of our training -- stay posted!

MayaMam Weavers Dot Com

Wow, big news! We have a new website ready for shopping! Please visit us. You can still shop on Etsy of course, but our website has (nearly) all of our products.

www.mayamamweavers.com Let us know what you think!

Perfect Shawl for Fall

We really do enjoy experimenting with different colors. This combination -- of rust with hunter green in our Delfina weave -- came out perfect for fall in the United States. Here in Cajola we do not have a season called fall. We have a season we call summer which is the cold and dry season, November through March; and we have a season we call winter which is warm and very rainy, April through October. But our warm and our cold are not too far apart. In the cold season it can get to the low 30's at night and in the 70's in the afternoon; in the warm season it is in the 50's at night and might be in the 80's in the afternoon. But we like to work towards your market, so here we are ready for fall!

Something Beautiful Just for Cajola

As you know, we have been trying to develop our local market here in Cajola. We have created a new design for our traditional huipiles. Our huipiles are something like blouses, though they are unstructured. Here we are showing you the new fabric. Actually, there are two, one is just simple magenta and black vertical stripes, the other is more complex, using 4 treadles and a weft in yellow. We will be presenting them at our local market for the first time on Sunday.

New Weave New Colors New Shawl!

Here is a new shawl for fall in our new weave which we named "Ocho" (which means "8" in Spanish). This weave came out of our experiments with our basic threading which has also given us our diamond weave, "Delfina" weave, and our herringbone. As you know, we are learning to do new threadings and new designs, so we will show some of them off next week! Here we combined a rich purple with a slate green color -- isn't it a rich combination?!

Our New Tablecloth Fabric

Our inspiration for this fabric came from right here in Cajola, where these colors are popular for our “mantels” (table runners). But we wove the stripes in a wide cloth to make tablecloths to sell in the US. We wove the stripes in the traditional brown, green and red stripes, and also have woven a companion fabric with cobalt instead of the red. We are selling the fabric by the yard at our Sunday market with some success already!

A New Style Heddle

For a long time we have wanted to learn some new weaving designs. Although we have been experimenting on our own, we have been looking for a master weaver to help us. This week we have begun to work with Don Oscar Boj, of Quetzaltenango. He will be working with us over the next few months helping us expand our understanding and improve our weaving. Don Oscar is teaching us the names of the parts of the loom in Spanish while we are teaching him the words in Mam. The very first thing we did was change from our string heddles to Texsolv polyester heddles. The Texsolv heddles are not common in Guatemala so we feel like pioneers.

Designing Huipils for Cajola

We are working on designing some new fabrics to sew into huipiles – the top part of our traditional clothes – to sell in our market here in Cajola. We are weaving in magenta with black vertical stripes in cotton, a stylish take off on our traditional red wool with horizontal stripes. But we plan to change the weave half way through to a more complex structure and incorporating more colors. You will have to wait to see what comes next!

Our New Gossamer Scarves in Rainbow Stripes on Champagne

Although we did learn this weave structure in our original training, we have only just “revived” it to weave these gorgeous lightweight scarves! We know they will be popular because our recent visitors from San Juan College, New Mexico scooped up 32 of them from our first weaving! Although our visitors were most interested in our new preschool, they were able to spend a bit of time with us and learn a bit about our weaving and our work together as a group.

MayaMam Weavers -- Look at Us!

We have a new friend, Murphy Woodhouse, who is an immigration activist and a photographer. He has been in nearby Quetzaltenango for a few months working on a project about the abuse our family members and friends receive from the US immigration authorities when they are detained at the border. He has been visiting us in Cajola because so many Cajolenses -- nearly 40% -- are in the US, and so many of them experience the abuse when they are detained. Murphy he took some time off to photograph us at work. We will be using some of his photos on our website (still in process). But here is one special photo we want to share with you ahead of time!

MayaMam Weavers Debut in Cajola Sunday Market

We aren’t sure why it has taken us this long, but last Sunday we set up a table in our local market. We had a place alongside the main square, which is a bit outside of the main market, but still a good place to start. We started off by offering some of our fabrics by the meter, our striped and embroidered wristbands, a completely new style of scarves, new colors of shawls, and our messenger bags. We didn’t actually sell too much this week but lots of people stopped by and promised to come next Sunday with their money in order to buy something. To prepare for the market, we have been working with our literacy teacher in how to fill out the sales sheet and calculate the sales and expenses so we know we have the correct amount of cash. We will be participating in the market every Sunday for the next weeks, then we will evaluate to see if we want to continue in Cajola or we want to go to the nearby huge market in San Juan Ostuncalco.

Creating New Weaving Patterns

We have been experimenting with new ways to thread our aviadura (a reed with string heddles). When we are preparing our loom to begin weaving, there are two very time-consuming parts. One is preparing the yarn by wrapping it around our warping wheel. The amount of time depends on the width of the fabric and whether there are stripes. And, if there are stripes, how many. The other challenging task is threading the string heddles. When we have learned one pattern of threading, we can obtain different weaving patterns depending on how we use our pedals. That is how we have changed the weave in our shawls. But now we have been experimenting now with different ways to string our string heddles. What do you think?

Baby Blankets!

At last we have made baby blankets out of the fabric we created a while back. First we had to weave the lining, a yellow fabric woven with a pink weft to match the yellow in the stripes. Sewing and machine quilting the blankets was a great opportunity to practice on our new FAST sewing machine. We are still learning to manage the speed, it is true, but little by little we are mastering it. The baby blankets are a special request of one of our friends in NY, but it looks like they might be popular here in Cajola, too!

And Our Matching Summery Aprons

Last week we showed you our summery towels in our “Elicia Stripe” (named for the weaver who designed the great brick and lime with lots of white stripes. Today we want to share with you the matching apron. Our apron has the same embroidery motif as the towels, a woman in her capacity to bear children. In our cosmovision a woman is seen as complementary to men, with equal but different roles. If you are suffering in this summer’s heat, think about wearing the apron outside while you barbecue your meals, or while you are picking your ripening vegetables from your garden.

Our New Summery Towels & Matching Apron

We are pleased to show you our new towels & a matching apron. Our weaver Elicia designed this stripe, so we have named it “Elicia’s Stripe”. The stripes include lots of white, with brick red and lime yellow dominating. (Of course we are thinking of summer in the USA, because summer for us is in December and January, and is cold and dry.) Our embroidered motif symbolizes a woman in her capacity to bear children. In our cosmovision a woman is seen as complementary to men, with equal but different roles. We have already listed our towels on Etsy: we will be listing the matching apron soon!

Our Ceremonial Calendar

One of the tools which our ancestors have handed down to us is a ceremonial calendar of 260 days. Each of these days is unique, pairing a day-name with a number. There are 20 different day-names and there are 13 different numbers, resulting in 260 unique days. The 20 different day-names refer to energies, which we also call nawals. Each nawal, or energy, works in different ways. Our spiritual guides have studied the meanings of the nawals and can help us understand the energy that comes with each day. This can help us in making plans or understanding the challenges that we might face. For example, today is 10 K’at. K’at is the nawal for “net,” “web,” or “fire”. It symbolizes existence and initiative. It is a day to create a safety net, seek like-minded organizations or people (network), free our thinking (disentangle) or prepare for new activities. The “net” could be a fishing net, a net to hold our harvested corn, our memory, or it could mean a tangle of problems. It is also the essence of fire, so it could be a day to disentangle problems as well. Nowadays not all of us consider our ceremonial calendar in our daily life, but it does offer us a way to think about each day to help us meet its challenges. Below you will see the symbol for K'at.

Our New Industrial Sewing Machine

You might think that going from pedal sewing machines to industrial sewing machines might be hard…well, it is! But we have purchased our first industrial sewing machine, a Juki 5500, to help us consistently sew high quality products. We learned to sew on our pedal machines, and they are quite useful during our frequent power outages, but they really are temperamental when it comes to thread tension and give us lots of headaches. Actually, our Juki is not so very complicated, little by little we are getting used to the speed. We are going to keep practicing on scraps until we feel confident. Our first product with the new machine is going to be machine-quilted baby blankets. With that, we will be masters of our new machine, for sure.

MayaMam Weavers at Bonnaroo – A Really Good Time

With lots of help from our friends from the Pulsera Project , we were at Bonnaroo last weekend. For those of you not in the know, it is a vibrant four-day music festival that takes place each year in Tennessee. (Bonnaroo comes from New Orleans slang meaning “a really good time.”) And, the Pulsera Project brought our headbands with them to sell. They had asked us to weave a new style of headband, much narrower, which we gladly did. Both styles of headbands were a hit at Bonnaroo and they sold out! Thank you, Pulsera Project! We had a really good time!

Introducing Our New Compañera

We are pleased to introduce Trish McLaughlin to you. Trish has joined us – fresh from college as you can see -- to help us develop the market for us in the USA. She studied fashion and costume design in school, and will be helping us design our products. Now we can present a more professional “face” in the US since she will be able to respond to orders and inquiries in a timely way. She has already begun reorganizing our little office. Her first big project is creating a web site for us, but you will begin to see her work as we present new products over the coming months. And we look forward to her visiting us in Cajola in the near future, too. Bienvenida, Trish!

Hot Pink for your Summer Whites

We would like to share with you our shawls in hot pink and purple, in our herringbone weave. (We call this our B'e weave. B'e means road or journey, our destiny in life. However, our fans recognize it as herringbone, so....) As usual, we have combined two colors, and we think the resulting weave makes an entirely new color, with even a shimmer to it. For us it is a bit magical. We have one loom dedicated to making shawls. We take great pleasure in deciding which colors to select from our palette of yarns each warping, and we really enjoy seeing the magic of the combination.

If you like this shawl, look for it tomorrow on our Etsy store...

Our Little Ones Are in School

As we have mentioned, we are part of Grupo Cajola, a community group working to “build a better Cajola, where people live in peace and dignity.” This week, they started a new preschool for our children. The school is named Xnaq’tz Nabl Qchman in our language Mam, which loosely translates into “Wisdom of our Elders School.” This first year our children are the only students, but next year it will be open to the community. The school is located where we used to weave on the foot looms – we have moved into new, more ample space. It is based on the principles of the Reggio Emilia preschools from Italy, where the interests of the children provide the basis for their development, and the emphasis is on developing children’s aptitudes, creativity, and collaboration rooted in their own culture. We have been creating children’s books in Mam for them and will be emphasizing Maya Mam culture and spirituality. But the best thing is that the children have the chance to play and develop and we have the chance to work more effectively. We are sharing a photo of the first day of school’s morning snack.

Our Green Diamond Towels

Diamonds as in diamond weave, not jewels. Some of you have seen and purchased these towels, we know, but we have just launched them on our Etsy store and want to let all of you know about them. We wove them on our 4-pedal loom in the same weave that we have been weaving for our table runners and placemats, except that there are fewer threads of yarn in the warp and the weft. This results in a finer weave, more pliable and excellent for drying dishes. We have embroidered the symbol for wisdom, or “Noj” on the front panel. We have woven them in two color choices, green on green and green on white. Our towels are sold in sets of two, so there are three different sets -- green on green, or green on white, or one of each!

Our Embroidered Tote Bags in Cobalt

These bags aren’t that new, but we haven’t shared them with you yet. We have launched them in this new color on Etsy as well. These tote bags are a collaboration among all of our groups. The beautiful embroidery is done on the backstrap loom, the cobalt medium-weight fabric is woven by our footloom weavers, and of course, our seamstresses are responsible for the final assembly. We have put a bright apricot colored lining with a slip pocket and a zippered pocket inside. The bag is elegant but very practical – it is sturdy and roomy. (There is a matching clutch, too!)

MayaMam Weavers & Earth Day 2012

We celebrated Earth Day with the Morris County Park Alliance last Saturday. It was a breezy cool day, but lots of people came out to have fun and to learn about safeguarding our planet and our environment. And, people came out to learn about sustainable business practices and fair trade. It is a pleasant event, with plenty of time to chat informally with people about our work. People are interested in learning about our traditional backstrap weaving. And we also have a chance to talk about fair trade and why our work is so important in ensuring that our children have access to education and to health care, and a better future. It is a day of optimism spent with like-minded people who are working to make the world the kind of place it needs to be so that all of us, our children and our grandchildren – down to the seventh generation as Native Americans say -- can live a healthy and dignified life. (Our shawls and aprons were especially popular!)

MayaMam helps the Pulsera Project Color The World

Something great happened to us at the Philadelphia Gift Show last January…we met Chris and Colin of the Pulsera Project. They are part of a wonderful project that “educates, empowers, and connects Nicaraguan youth with students in more than 200 US schools through the sale of colorful, hand-woven bracelets, or “pulseras" in Spanish.” They were looking for bracelets, and although we hadn’t planned to present any of ours the show, luckily we had brought some along with us. So we were able to show them our style of weaving and embroidery that we do on the backstrap loom. They really liked them, and we have started working with them on a regular basis. This is, of course, very nice from a business point of view. But because they share our passion for a world that is more just, we feel it is more than just business -- we have found new compañeros. Below we would like to share some examples of their style of pulseras and some of ours in the lower photo.

We love this photo!

Take a look at their project! www.pulseraproject.org

A New Spring Shawl in Violet and Butter Yellow

We are always weaving new colors into our shawls. It is such fun to weave with different colors and it is especially fun to see how two colors interact. This shawl is woven in a design we call “B’e”. B’e means “road” in Mam and is a symbol for our destiny or path in life. But it looks like the traditional herringbone pattern, so we have translated road into herringbone!

Here we experimented with violet and a soft butter yellow. We are pleased with the results, which include a nice shimmer. We are posting it on Etsy, too, if you want to take a better look.

MayaMam Weavers & TAFA

We have talked about our membership in TAFA -- The Textile and Fiber Arts List -- before, now we invite you to take a look at TAFA’s new web site, it is really gorgeous. We are members of this “community of entrepreneurs rooted in textile and fiber art products and traditions”. Besides being honored to be among such talented people (as well as receiving sales leads), we have been learning a lot about online marketing. We have just completed loading our own profile, and we have connected it to our etsy store.

If you have a bit of time, check it out, it is visually DELICIOUS.

www.tafalist.com for the site; and
http://www.tafalist.com/members/mayamam-weavers for our page.

And while we are on the topic of the internet (and visually delicious), we have also bravely started a board on Pinterest. To start with we have a tiny board called “Colors”. It is lots of fun but also a great way to keep in touch visually with what is happening in fashion, home décor, and design. (Please know there is quite a controversy around Pinterest and copyrighting if you are an artist. However, as an electronic bulletin board it is very useful for avid “clippers”.)

See you online!

A New Spring Shawl in Rose & Champagne

We really enjoy choosing the colors for our shawls! We love this combination of rose pink with champagne, especially for the way the weave blends the two colors into a completely different hue. And if you know our shawls in our “Delfina weave”, you know that the colors change a lot in the lighting.

Here are a couple of photos of the shawls…and we will be putting the shawl up on Etsy today, too!