Guatemalans are justly celebrated for their amazing weavings on backstrap looms. While most indigenous men have worn western clothes for decades, most of the women still wear their traditional garb, the traje. The blouse is called a huipil, the skirt: a corte. There are intricate guidelines for headbands, cintas, I seem to recall that they can signify marital status.
Below you can see the coloring from the village of Casaca in material being woven for a corte. The first image shows a bit of the backstrap loom. Several months will be needed to finish this skirt.
The second shows a close-up of the spider motif on the weaver's corte: there are many nearby spiders to use as examples! In many mythologies, spiders are associated with weaving. I still recall the image of a spider weaving from a favorite children's book of Japanese folktales,The Spider Weaver. In Mayan cosmology, the goddess Ixchel is credited with inventing weaving. She is also the goddess of childbirth and medicine. In the 1980s, I wrote a play that featured Ixchel as a character so I did a bunch of research, most of which eludes my little gray cells now. The play was set in the Lincoln Park Conservatory. As a kid, I used to hang out there and in Caldwell's Lily Pond, which was known as the Rookery once upon a time.
2 comments:
It's great to know that the culture of weaving is still very much alive in Guatemala. As for weaving spiders, I always think of Charlotte's Web when I look at the myriad webs made by spiders in my shed.
Charlotte's Web: of course! Another formative book of childhood...Some Pig.
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