The village of Teotitlán de Valle, located about 30 miles east of Oaxaca, is famous for handwoven wool rugs. The rugs are irresistable for their patterns and colors!
In this home, the family cleans, spins, dyes and weaves the wool themselves. For color they use natural materials such as insects, seeds, flowers, herbs, fruits and so on.
Here, you can see cochineal, from a dried scale insect that lives on cactus, being ground into powder. When the powder is added to water, carmine red dye is obtained. When lime juice is added, the color changes to orange. By adding more cochineal, you obtain magenta. They say that cochineal can be manipulated to obtain 50 different colors.
Even the little mortar table is beautiful. Does the wool come from sheep? and do they raise the animals too?
ReplyDeleteThe wool comes from somewhere else. Things are very compartmentalized here. For example, you make rugs but someone else has the wool; notebooks come from a papelería, not the grocery store.
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