MayaMam Weavers & NYNOW

Wow, in August we participated in NYNOW, the new name for the NY International Gift Show. This is a big deal for us, you know. Our booth is in the Global Handmade section (which is juried). Our visitors were interested in a little bit of everything. We were especially pleased with the interest in our fabrics which we have decided to sell by the yard. The Home Trends exhibit in the first floor entryway included one of our Celebration Table Runners in the "Well-Cultured" trend, one of our aprons was included in Gourmet Business, and our fabrics were included in LDB Textiles. We saw lots of interest due to our new membership in the Fair Trade Federation, too! Now we are busy responding to our orders and leads and planning for the next show in February. Whew!

MayaMam Weavers and The Straight Road

One of the weaves we learned in our training we call "the straight road". Now we are seeing how we can use this weave in our next handbag collection. We are experimenting with various combinations of colors. The weave takes its dominant color from the weft, which in this case is black. Here you can see the difference between the white warp and the champagne warp. We are experimenting with some other colors, too, but you will have to wait a few months to see what the new bag collection looks like!

MayaMam Weavers Make it to Cajola Town Hall

We are very pleased to report that the mayor requested 200 meters of our design "Cajola huipil" to use as curtains in all of the town hall. Not only is that a great order, but everyone in Cajola will be able to see our work. We originally designed this fabric to go on our ergonomic benches, but it was so popular that we have made it into towels and aprons, men's vests, women purchase the fabric to make into huipils, and now, curtains for Town Hall.

The picture shows Delfina cutting the fabric from the loom. And we were able to weave the entire 200 meters with only two warpings, using our new large warper. Now we are ready for anything!

MayaMam Weavers & Pulsera Project

Wow, we just participated in Bonnaroo 2013! Well, at least our pulseras and skinny headbands were in Tennessee with our great friends from the Pulsera Project. They do fantastic work "coloring the world" giving US youth a chance to learn about and make friends with Nicaraguan youth. We have been working with them for the past few years, and they have certainly broadened our world. So, here we are in Tennessee, and here we are providing a rodeo cowboy some luck. You can learn more about the Pulsera Project at www.pulseraproject.org.

MayaMam Weavers & Our Second Industrial Sewing Machine

Our seamstresses continue growing in their skills. Even though we still experience regular outages of electricity, and our pedal sewing machines certainly are reliable, we are pleased to have a new industrial machine. These machines really are constructed to do excellent work, and we can continue to be proud of the quality of our work. Wait til you see our new collection of handbags.

MayaMam Weavers & More Emerald Green

Did you know that emerald green is Pantone's color of the year? We have been weaving with emerald green since we wove our first fabric after our initial training! This year we have an subtle emerald that has a white yarn woven in the warp, and our seamstresses have sewn it into full length aprons that go with our emerald and emerald and white diamond kitchen towels. (They also look great with our original emerald striped towels.) You can see that emerald is a favorite in Cajola, too.

MayaMam Weavers Proud Members of the Fair Trade Association

We are so pleased to have been accepted by the Fair Trade Association! Although we firmly believe in their principles and believe we have been practicing them since the very beginning, it is very satisfying to have passed their somewhat rigorous review process. So we can say confidently to all of your that yes, we are practicing the Principles of Fair Trade. As the Fair Trade Federation website explains: "Fair trade is an approach to business and to development based on dialogue, transparency, and respect that seeks to create greater equity in the international trading system. Fair trade supports farmers and craftspeople in developing countries who are socially and economically marginalized. These producers lack economic opportunity and often face steep hurdles in finding markets and customers for their goods. Fair trade is much more than just trade. At the core of the fair trade model is a direct, cooperative, and in-depth relationship between buyers and sellers that keeps all of the principles of fair trade at the forefront." And if you want to delve further, visit their website, particularly the page on fair trade principles: http://www.fairtradefederation.org/fair-trade-federation-principles We are honored to be recognized for our commitment, too.

MayaMam Weavers - What happens when you cross diamonds with stripes?

Well, we wanted to know! We have woven our diamond pattern in many different color variations, and we have woven innumerable stripes in different colors, but we wondered what would we get if we wove stripes into our diamonds? So that has been our most recent experiment. We are happy with the results, and will give you a couple of examples below. Now you have to watch to see what we do with the resulting fabric!

Here we are in April, 2013, now with 21 members. It has been a while since we updated our group photo and we have had growth and changes in our group. (One of our members was ill and is not in the photo). Caryn has been gathering statistics about us, so we want to share them here too. Of our 21 members, 16 are mothers and among us we have a total of 45 children. Most of us have one or two, but we have as many as 7 children in our families. Very sadly but typical of Cajola, 13 of us are single mothers. We are single mothers for various reasons...some of us are widows (one of our husbands was killed by the drug gangs when he was trying to cross the border), some of us have been discarded by our husbands or lovers. One of our member's husband has been in the U.S. for more than 15 years. Here in Guatemala we call that a "white widow". Our other "survey" was about education. Nine of our members never had the opportunity to go to school at all. One finished first grade, 3 finished 2nd grade, 5 finished 3rd grade, 1 finished 6th grade and one is studying in college. We are very proud of her. But the rest of us have been studying with Anadelmi, our literacy teacher at work, to be able to learn to read and write and do our math so we can keep track of our business!

MayaMam Weavers New Stripes

We have just designed two new stripe patterns to take advantage of this year's trending colors -- jade, mustard, and coral in one and jade (again) with violet in the other. Let us know what you think!

MayaMam Weavers & Ramapo College

We have the help of many hands in New Jersey this month. Professor Doerr's World Cultures class has been volunteering hours working for us. Students have been ironing, sewing on belt buckles, taking inventory, and updating our Etsy store. And guess what, just after Justin B. uploaded our wallets, we sold one! In the photo you can see Trish sewing on buckles and Justin working at the computer. Chjonte to ALL the students working so hard for us.

MayaMam Weavers Our New BIG Warper

Along with our new space getting better and better -- we finally have electricity, nearly 10 months after we requested it -- we have a new large-sized warper. We needed a larger warper because we are starting to sell our fabrics by the yard in the US, and because we are (hopefully) beginning a collaboration with a group in Mazatenango to provide them with bolts of wide fabric that they will turn into curtains, sheets, and such to sell to their local market. The diameter of the warper is the limiting factor on the length of our bolts of fabric. This new one really expands our potential.

MayaMam Weavers Our Destiny

You know that many of the symbols we embroider come from our collective memory -- sometimes without our knowing really what they mean! Here are two embroideries of the symbol for destiny. You can see that they also resemble a path! We Maya believe that we each have a "star" to follow, a mission in life. Part of our life's work is to figure out what that is! It means each person is born with certain talents (and weaknesses) that suit us for a particular role in life. One of the ways that we can recognize when we are NOT following on our path is that we are out of balance. That can show itself in illness, not getting along with our family or friends, just feeling miserable. We can look for a solution to our illness or other problems with the aid of a spiritual guide, most probably in a ceremony. Because of our close relationship with nature, nature communicates with us to indicate what we need to do to bring ourselves back into balance. Through ceremonies, reflections, and counseling by the spiritual guide we can identify what exactly is out of balance and work to correct it. that might mean that we discover we are not yet doing what our life's work is supposed to be, so we need to change our path.

They're Here! MayaMam Shipment Arrives in the USA

If you haven't imported anything into the US or exported anything out of Guatemala, you will not appreciate nearly enough our sighs of pleasure and relief. But, our 24 boxes landed safely in Morristown NJ on Friday February 22nd. They left our storeroom in Cajola on January 9th, but got hung up in paperwork until the boxes left by ship (less than containerload)on January 28th. They were 3 weeks in transit, arriving in Miami on February 15th...one week for customs clearance and trucking (less than truckload) to Morristown. You can see the boxes arrived in nearly perfect condition. Now to market!

MayaMam Weavers on Etsy

We are way behind on putting our products in our Etsy store. We have been busy learning our new weaving designs and getting ready for last month's NY International Gift Fair. So finally we are putting our cobalt striped towels and matching apron in our Etsy shop. Don't forget you can always go to our own website www.mayamamweavers.com to see what we have to sell. Saludos!

Our New Wallets

We don't want you to think our seamstresses are sitting back relaxing, they have been sewing up new products! Here are our new wallets, redesigned by Trish. They go with what we call our "Journey Collection" -- a huge carryall and our very popular messenger bag. So this slim wallet completes the set. In spite of all the pockets, the seamstresses like this product because it is so small and manageable, whereas that carryall is enormous. We will get this put up on Etsy and our own website SOON!

MayaMam Weavers Glittering in Purple

We are putting our training into practice! We included the metalic thread we were experimenting in into our new purple shawls. The thread is not strong enough to weave the length of the warp, so we have inserted it into our wefts. Here is a photo of our newest scarves...they will be on Etsy and our website soon!

MayaMam Weavers New York Debut

We are proud to say that we participated in this winter's New York International Gift Fair. This is a really big deal for us, and we were so pleased with how the buyers responded to our products. That Javits Center is HUGE! But our booth looked great and caught people's eyes as they walked by. We offered our visitors small pieces of chocolate -- made by Doña Pancha -- but wrapped in ribbons made of our fabrics...people were interested in buying those, too. We will be participating in this important event twice each year as we grow our US business. Here is what our booth looked like, and here are Jean and Trish preparing for our visitors.

MayaMam Weavers Learning to Read and Write

Many of us did not have the chance to go to school when we were growing up. Some of us were orphans, some of our parents didn't have enough money to send us to school, and other parents just wanted their male children to go to school. Our teacher, Anadelmi, comes four days a week to teach us to read and write. Sometimes she teaches us how to fill out some of the paperwork we need to fill out as part of the business, like sales summaries, or our records of our work. For some of us it takes a long time, but we are proud when little by little we can change those characters into words that mean something. And you know, when we can read at work, we can read at home, too, and begin to help our children with their studies.

Keeping the Colors Flowing With Our Gossamer Scarves

Really we are having fun creating new color combinations for our gossamer scarves. And it seems each new color combination is quite popular! We have been experimenting a bit with the weave, but more with the colors. Here are two of the newer combinations.

MayaMam Weavers New Designs in 2013

Happy New Year to all of you! We are expecting this new year to be very exciting. We will be using the weaving techniques we have been learning in the last few months to weave extraordinary fabrics. Here are some new designs we have learned -- incorporating metallic threads. Wow! We are now in the last phase of our training, which is to learn to weave the brocade embroideries of the backstrap loom on our foot looms. It is a bit overwhelming actually, but with persistence and perseverance we will learn!!!