Dye in Chayatire

Chayatire is a community, about an hour and a half outside of Cusco, up the mountain from Pisac (in the sacred valley). Elevation: almost 4000m This community does almost exclusively Ley techniques in their weaving, and they love their reds/purples more than anything. I mean, they REALLY love red, to the point we did nothing but cochineal-based dyes until (and finished them after) lunch. 4 types of cochineal dye colors, using 22kilos of Cochineal yesterday: Bright Red (Fire Scarlet), Dark Red, Garnet, and Purple.



And so you get an idea what a vat in this situation looks like, here's the Cochineal dye notes I took yesterday:

Rojo Oscuro:
80L pot
~30kilos Lana

2.5 tazas Alum
1.75 tazas Citric Acid
2Kilos + 5 tazas Cochineal
2tazas Vinagre

Morado Oscuro:
80L pot
~20kilos Lana

2 tazas Alum
2 tazas Citric Acid
2 kilos Cochineal
5 tazas Copper Sulfate

Rojo Claro:
Q’uolle yellow first
Cochineal is added to the same yellow vat, after the most flowers possible are strained out.

80L pots
~20kilos lana

2 tazas Alum
1 taza Citric Acid
1.5 kilos Cochineal

Also:
Exhaust Rojo Claro – Add more Q’uolle for orange
Exhaust Rojo Oscuro – Add more Alum/Citric Acid/ Cochineal/ Copper Sulfate for purple
Exhaust Morado – Added to a fresh Rojo Oscuro vat to make granate.

Cochineal Notes:
Alum = Mordant
Citric Acid = Helps yarn absorb the Cochineal’s color, because otherwise it washes out
Vinegar = helps set color (modifier)

I'm not sure most of the fiber artist I know can imagine an 80L pot let alone the amount of yarn that fits into one. But that's how it was (and always is) at the dyes. My plan for these recipes is to cut them down to only being for 1kilo of yarn. That way, it might actually be useful for someone like me (or the Center's future volunteers).

Some pictures I took during the Cochineal Dyes:

Sorting the skeins for the different dyes we'd be doing.



Preparing dyes. The first is Chilq'ua (dark green), the second is Palo-Palo (peach).





Some of the Tejadoros stirring the dye pots. There are more male weavers in Chayatire than any other community the center works with.



Removing yarn from the vat.



Cochineal pots simmering...



More hoisting of yarn from vats (piles and piles of red yarn!)





This girl was the daughter of one of the community elders. She was absolutely fascinated by us (the strangers) and kept trying to creep over to get closer without us noticing (she also snuck up on me and touched my hair at one point, so cute). We gave her some of our extra potatoes, which she took shyly, and then climbed into her dad's lap.



After lunch was Palo-Palo (peach), Kinsa Q'uchu (turquoise), Chilq'ua (dark green), Orange (bright red cochineal exhaust + more Q'uolle), and el color del diablo (which is basically a dark dark colored vat, where all the cochineal exhaust water that's left is mixed, sometimes with a bit of other dye waters, and they get a burgundy/brown color). I myself ended the day with a skein of bright red, a skein of dark red, 2 skiens of garnet, a skein of dark purple, a skein of turquoise, and a skien of orange. Not a bad haul, if I say so myself.

Dye Day in Sallac

On our way home, driving down a dirt road with frequently occurring switchbacks, I had this realization that I live in the Andes Mountains... Maybe the coolest realization ever. Like anything else I'm surrounded with daily, I think sometimes I take them for granted. They're gigantic and gorgeous and in Cusco, they're just part of the city. However, once outside of Cusco, they're all you see and you have to move with them and between them to get anywhere. Long story short, mountains are gorgeous and I love them.

Today I woke up at 5:30am so I could accompany Nilda at her yearly dye day at Sallac, a village south of Cusco. Very few things other than natural dyes could get me out of bed at that hour. We drove the hour and a half to Sallac, the last half hour of which was spent on the above mentioned switch backs, working our way from the bottom to the top of a mountain. We got there and it was the most organized dye anything I've ever seen. The yarn was already scoured and sorted by color, the stoves were lit and water was already boiling, they dyes they had were already in their pots, clotheslines were hung, sticks were positioned next to their vats, and all the weavers were present. We unloaded and began immediately.



Today we did 12 dye vats:

Q'uolle

A flower dye that gives yellows. When combined with a Cochineal exhaust bath, you get deep golden yellows.

Fire Scarlet Cochineal- Using the yellow dyed yarn and the 1st yellow vat, you add red cochineal to the vat after straining out the flowers. Then you re-add the yellow yarn, as well as Alum and Citric acid to get a really beautiful true red.

Lichen

Lichens here grow on the cliff faces, and give rusty copper browns
**note: we were using low-altitude lichens today. high altitude lichens give slightly different colors

Palo-Palo

A twig that is bundled and dried, and then chopped roughly into small pieces before dyeing. It gives pretty peach/salmon colors (Durasno).

Awaypili

A purple leave that is dried and then dyed with. By itself, it give a medium to dark blue-purple.

Red-Purple Cochineal- The yarn is dyed first in a awaypili vat, the leaves are strained out of the water and shaken from the yarn, and the cochineal is added to the dye water. The yarn is re-added with Alum and Citric acid to achieve really dark warm purples.

Burgundy Cochineal

Cochineal on white yarn with citric acid and alum. With no color modification from other vats, the color is less true red as it has a little pink/purple in it.

Chilq'ua

A shrubby leafy plant that grows everywhere in the mountains, on hill sides and along the sides of the roads. The leaves are long and narrow and are used fresh for dyeing. They give beautiful middle greens, and with the addition of Cupric Sulfate (found in the volcanic rock here) they give dark greens and olives.

Chilq'ua/Q'uolle mix- gives a "limon green" as they say here, which by that they mean the green of the peel of a lime.

Q'uolle + Cochineal exhaust vats- give either golden yellow or orange depending on the ratio of dyestuffs.

Other than dyeing, I was lucky enough to be taken out to their 4 Prickly Pear Cactus sites around the village. They are growing them with the intention of trying to start a Cochineal insect crop, and as they the community furthest south, they're potentially warmer than the rest. The cacti were really cute and had little new growth buds along their tops like crowns. While we were out, they showed me what Chilq'ua and Q'uolle looked like as plants, which was cool too.

The Prickly Pear Cactus


The Q'uolle


We were basically finished with the dyeing by the time lunch rolled around. Lunch was a little embarrassing, because the 4 of us in Nilda's party were treated as "honored guests" and therefore were served our soup first and given bigger portions of meat than anyone except the village elders. Nilda and I agreed it was an awkward position to be in, but it's rude not to eat it and who would you share it with if you could?

After lunch, we rinsed anything we'd left cooking during lunch, cleaned all the pots and tubs, sorted the yarn, packed up, and drove home. Got back around 4pm, exhausted and stuffy from the campfire smoke, but I wouldn't have traded it for anything.



**NOTE: Sallac is one of the only villages in the area that uses Ikat. A bunch of what we dyed were tied Ikat warps. I'm always really excited to see these weavings in the Center's shops, because it's really rare here.

Textile Conservation Workshop

The CTTC runs workshops every so often, for the education of the public, and also for the education of the children in their affiliated weaving communities. The textile conservation workshop they run once a year began yesterday. Instead of heading out to Chinchero and weaving, I sat in on the morning portion of the workshop to get a better idea of what their textile conservation methods are. They have a conservation expert on staff, and get grant money to preserve the ancient textiles in their collection and to hold these workshops. Of course, it was completely in Spanish, so until the actual work started I was a little lost... However, I feel I followed along well enough to get the idea. ^_^

You begin by creating a clean work space-- plastic to cover the tables and archival tissue paper to go under the weavings. Then we laid them all out (9 in total, the oldest being an Incan vest that needed alot of help, the majority of the rest being colonial in their period). Then you begin describing and documenting the textile in question with photos. You catalog what's in need of help, as detailed as possible. Then out comes the cleaning tools: you use a soft brush to get particulates off the textile, then lay green plastic mesh over it and vacuum it. Then you remove the tissue paper from under it and replace it with paper towels. Wet the textile (damp not soaking) and block it (stretch it so it's completely flat), then use the tweezers to align the threads that have come unwoven. If it's really dirty, at this step you might use baby shampoo to wash it gently or a combination of rubbing alcohol and ammonia to clean it. Once it's clean and flat and the threads are aligned, you lay paper towels and then a sheet of glass over the top and let it stand. Once it's dry you use a combination of starched broad cloth and mesh fabrics to repair and stabilize the textile, so that it will not be as fragile. When I left, the girls had cleaned and pressed all their textiles and were practicing stitching for when they were allowed to stabilize the fabrics.

The girls are going to be coming to the center every weekend this month for the workshops. I think next weekend, however, I'm going to weave.