Threads of Peru Blog

May through September is peak wedding season in North America, and many of us will attend at least one ceremony before it’s over. Whether it’s your best friend, your cousin or a sibling chances are you’ll be looking for a special wedding gift for the happy couple as they embark on their new life together. Maybe you’re a last-minute shopper or maybe you like to stand apart from the typical registry offerings, but if you’re after something truly unique and meaningful, the MUNAY wedding table runner could be just what you’ve been searching for.

Q’INTIKUNA CHURUNAKUY  - Love Woven into the Fabric of the Wedding Table Runner

As in many cultures across the globe and throughout the centuries, textiles play an important part of the traditional wedding rituals in the Andes. Not only are special garments prepared, sometimes months in advance, to adorn the bridal party, textiles also play a role as a form of dowry, a testament of the bride-to-be’s weaving ability, and special woven patterns have been developed to represent the loving union.

Though the subtleties of meaning vary from community to community, the patterns that illustrate frontally opposed birds – such as the q’intikuna churunakuy pattern featured in the MUNAY wedding table runner, which depicts hummingbirds with beaks joined – represent affection and love.  Such patterns can also specifically express the affection the giver of the weaving feels towards the recipient.

 Similar pallays featuring birds sharing food further symbolize the way a couple will share resources now that they are joined as one. There is also a balance in the MUNAY wedding table runner, such as in the contrasting use of light and dark colours. Like the traditional Chinese yin and yang symbols which illustrate the balance between male and female energies.

 “Weddings symbolically bring together an asymmetrical but balanced union of male and female duality. This union, called yanatin in Quechua symbolically joins the ayllus of the male and the female in reciprocal commitments formed by the joining of man and woman.”

- Andrea Heckman, Woven Stories

Whether displayed on a wall or used to add a decorative touch to a table or other home furnishing, the MUNAY wedding table runner is a gorgeous work of woven art imbued with the love and affection that we celebrate during the wedding season.

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Hola – Hoi – Hey – Salut

My time with Threads of Peru has exceeded my expectations. Visiting the communities and learning how to weave with a back strap loom myself has greatly inspired me. I was able to closely watch the weaver’s habits, their styling as well as the way they transport and wrap their belongings and purchases.

I immersed myself in the Andean culture trying to translate their textile tradition into the modern world. I was searching for a design language that both cultures – the Andean, and my own culture (which I would like to call European) will understand. 

Eliane out and about near the community of Chaullacocha during an entrega.

I am a fashion designer from Zurich, Switzerland, however for the past two years I have been living in Paris, France. I moved to Paris to work for the fashion designer LUTZ HUELLE. After two years of assisting the creative director, I decided that I was ready to take the next step and built up my own company and brand. 

 Elaine learning to weave on a backstrap loom.

However before embarking on this new chapter in my life, I wanted to widen my horizon further by seeing a corner of the world that is still unknown to me. Being passionate about textiles, design, pattern making and fashion, I applied to Threads of Peru proposing to design a little capsule collection for them. 

Eliane and Armando working on creating the prototypes for her capsule collection.

As a result I used traditional pallays (textile designs) and known combinations, such as their black skirts with the colourful Golòn (a work-intensive and difficult ribbon), combined them with leather and gave them a modern, clean shape. I paid a lot of attention to finishings and details, which I believe are the essence of a clean, luxurious product. 

Sewing the prototypes with new shapes and sizes has been a fun adventure for the team in Chinchero.

I fell in love with Cusco and the surrounding communities and even though I don’t know what the future will bring and if I ever come back to this area, it has greatly impacted my life. It has also inspired me to travel and explore all traditional and unique textile techniques in the world. I would love to continue collaborating with other similar organizations around the world.

Eliane piled up in the back of a truck to make her way to the community of Parobamba.

I am very grateful to the team of Threads of Peru, Sarah So (volunteer coordinator) who made me feel at home and helped me wherever she could from the minute I landed in Cusco and Dana Blair (project coordinator) who took along to all her community visits and faithfully trusted in my design decisions, and all the other volunteers, Stephanie Pardi, Alexa Jones, Giulia Grassi and Harrison Ackerman who enriched my work but also private time in Cusco.

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I’ve spent the better part of the last six years working with traditional weaving in highland communities in Peru, and even though I’m intimately familiar with the basic backstrap loom techniques, the processes involved never cease to amaze me!

On a recent community visit, I watched a woman busily work on one of her weavings and I was completely enthralled – how quickly her fingers moved across the warp, picking up and dropping yarns in order to form a single row of woven fabric. Her movements were fluid, with no hesitation, even with multiple unique pallays, or woven patterns, to create. It was simply fascinating to watch. Having learned to weave myself just one (simple) pattern at a time, I’m continually impressed by these weavers’ ability not only to memorize a myriad of different patterns, but also to simultaneously and effortlessly flow from one pattern to the next in a given row of weaving, and not lose their place in the design. 

Photograph by Isaiah Brookshire

To this point, I’ve only mastered weaving a chumpi – a narrow band featuring just one pallay; basically I’m at the level of a 10 year old girl! When I learned to weave, I learned by watching as most people in the weaving communities do, starting from a very young age, often just six or seven years old. My teacher – just a girl herself! – would weave the first repeat of a design and I would watch her intently, attempting to follow the pattern: which yarns to bring to the top and which to let drop to the back. Then, she would hand it to me and, working in part by memory and in part by counting, I would attempt to replicate her work by weaving the next repeat in the pattern. When I went to Chinchero one weekend to practise what I’d learned, I was quickly surrounded by a gaggle of schoolgirls asking me, “How many patterns do you know?,” eager to compare notes as they shared with me the ones they’d already mastered, and which ones were next on their list to learn. 

Photography by Isaiah Brookshire

These patterns learned early on are fairly simple consisting of only maybe a dozen or so rows, making keeping track of one’s place fairly easy by counting or by memorizing the sequence. Some of the more advanced designs, however – including some of my favourites frequently featured in Threads of Peru textiles – are so complex, the idea of counting yarns in order to keep your place in the pattern – let alone memorizing the sequence – just seems impossible!

The work these weavers do, and the grace with which they do it, is truly astonishing, and the results – as evidenced by everything featured in these pages – are works of art of the highest order.

Post written by: Sarah Confer

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