Sugar Glider Sweater

This is the Sugar Glider Sweater. It has an unusual and intriguing shape since it's knitted sideways. Cabling, applique and honeycomb stitches create yummy textures. Made with a double thick 100% alpaca yarn, this sweater is as warm as it is comfortable. This was a collaborative design by Ezra Descarfino and Dax Alpaca. (model Ezra D.)

Rubi Poncho

This is a very simple, lightweight poncho made of 100% alpaca. The one in the photo was made with a special space-dyed yarn (hard to come by, alas), which gives it a subtle, striped effect. Springtime is the right time to wear this poncho. We have some new colors on the way- marled teal, berry, black. Retail price is about $80.

Ariana Dress

This is a gorgeous 100% baby alpaca knit dress. We make this design with a knitting workshop in Arequipa, Peru. The knitter, Patricia, has an elegant, feminine sense of style. She sends lots of fine alpaca garments to customers in France and Italy. The Ariana dress is very classy, with nice lines and slimming rib details.

Crochet Gloves

These crochet gloves are each handmade by skilled artisans in Lima, Peru, using 100% alpaca. In addition to being very warm (of course, they're made of alpaca) and soft, they are very durable. I noticed that knitted gloves would often wear holes in the fingertips after a season or two. This is a shame because alpaca garments last for many years and still retain a new appearance. We started making these crocheted gloves a couple of years ago with a group of artisans in Lima. They first caught my eye because the stitches are small and dense- good properties for keeping out the wind. When the first batch arrived, Ezra nabbed a pair for "product testing"- that's how she justifies it- and even after a year of hard wear (she rides her bike to work) they show no holes, pills or thin spots. We make size M and L. The price is $45. Assorted solids and stripes.

warping in Juliaca

Before my trip to Peru, Ezra and I began the design process for the scarves, shawls and blankets that Lucas agreed to weave for us. I guided her on technical aspects of this style of weaving, and she selected a color palette from a stock of alpaca yarn and then combined different colors for each design. Our knitters in Lima had sent the yarn to Lucas a few days before my arrival, so the stage was set to begin setting up the looms for weaving. I communicated the designs to the weavers using sketches which indicated the different warps, wefts and weaving patterns for each set of textiles. We wove twenty scarves, ten shawls and ten throws per warp. This was the easy part, as Lucas and I had been through this same process countless times during our many years of collaboration in Bolivia.
See Lucas and Felipe giving a demonstration on the warping tree. The cones of alpaca yarn are threaded onto the warping tree, which is rotated a certain number of times depending on the size and number of textiles you plan to weave. From here, the yarns are removed from the warping tree and threaded onto the loom as the warp. In the other photo, Lucas is seen sitting at his loom. The white yarn on the right is the warp, passing through the heddles and then the beater. He opens a shed by pressing the treadles with his feet and passing the weft through the shed. He tightens this "pick" with the beater (which is hinged to the base of the loom), and then proceeds to open the next shed for the next pick.
We are currently working on another round of handloom textiles with Lucas and Co.

weaving with Lucas

I met Lucas back in 1998 when I made my first "alpaca" trip to Bolivia. He was the head weaver for a small handloom outfit in El Alto. La Paz has a stunning setting in a steep canyon high up in the Altiplano south of Lake Titicaca. You can see the streets running up the sides of the canyon until it gets really steep, then they make switchbacks. There is only so much room, and then there is El Alto. Above the canyon, the Altiplano is relatively flat, but also very windy, bleak and cold. This is where El Alto was born and continues to sprawl in rampant, disorganized fashion. Land is cheaper here, and growth had nowhere else to go. This is where the weaving workshop was. Even though the weavers always had a few electric heaters going, it was hard to ever get warm. There's something about concrete block construction that just sucks the heat out of you. By the way, the workshop did eventually relocate to the balmy burg of Cochabamba, where they are still weaving, albeit in much greater comfort.
I worked with Lucas and the other weavers for about ten years. Last year, Lucas sent me an email out of the blue to tell me he had gone back to Peru (where he is from) and had begun his own weaving workshop. We arranged to meet during a trip down last April. He and Felipe, who also was a weaver at the same workshop in Bolivia, met me at the bus station the night I arrived in Juliaca. The air is thin and cold at 13,000ft so we went straight to the hotel and sat down for dinner in the lobby restaurant. After a round of pisco sours, I ordered the Titicaca lake trout, which is always delicious. The next day, we met in town and took a moto-taxi (like a motorized rickshaw) a short distance from town. It was a humble building with electricity but without plumbing (there is an outhouse behind). The view across the road is quite rural and beautiful- note the shepherds, flocks and adobe dwellings. It was great to greet the weavers' families (whom I hadn't seen in a few years) and give some chocolates to the kids. We all shared some Inca Kola and started discussing our weaving project.

Shipibo Textiles 2

Shipibo ceramics and textiles display a unique motif of abstract geometric lines and shapes. Small, even and rhythmic lines are joined at nexus points to make larger shapes. Among these larger shapes are crosses, tumis (Andean ceremonial knives with semi-circular blades), and domes, as well as many less representational figures. These images are drawn by hand and do not follow a pattern. The eye dances as it follows the lines, while never reaching a destination. The symbolism of these images is not understood (at least by non-Shipibo viewers). Leonidas says they represent shamanistic visions associated with ayahuasca or "spirit vine" (a hallucenogenic plant from the Amazon).
Leonidas had several different kinds of textiles. The smallest were made of a basic cotton cloth which was mud-dyed to a ruddy ochre color with a black border. On this cloth is embroidered the geometric designs using a cotton thread. In the photo, at least eight colors of thread are used to show an evolved sense of color. A skill with line is also evident with the positive/negative play of the shapes. The mat is about 11" x 14" and is $45.
There are also larger textiles which do not have embroidery. These are made on cotton cloth with a two-color resist dye technique. The colors are made with different kinds of earth, some imbuing a very dark brown, others a lighter ochre tone.

Shipibo Textiles

I met Leonidas and two of her children one afternoon in Lima. I was attracted to a window display of a store, and as I got nearer I saw a woman inside stringing beads next to a makeshift bench. She encouraged me to enter with a smile, hand signals and friendly words. This is Leonidas, a Shipibo woman from Pucallpa. The Shipibo are an indigenous group from the Peruvian Amazon. She explained that she had travelled from Pucallpa to Lima to sell her textiles and jewelry. The owner of this store was sympathetic to her needs and gave her a small area to display her goods. The beads she was stringing were actually seeds from the rain forest- black, brown, red/black, cream. I spent a couple of hours sorting through the piles and selecting the best ones. The bracelets are $15 and the necklaces $20.

Here's a design Ezra Descarfino and I created last year. It's part of the "Ruffle" collection that began with a scarf we created for a private label customer two years ago. I've started to see lots more ruffles in the fashion magazines of late (e.g. Vogue, March 2010), so this design feature has officially become a trend ;)
The Ruffle Top is 100% baby alpaca, full-fashioned, ruffles are hand-stitched, shown in berry. (Ezra D. in photo)

Snood with Boucle Trim

Here's one of our designs from last fall. It's called a "snood," which is a very old garment dating from the Middle Ages. This one is made of baby alpaca with a boucle trim. The first batch was basic colors like black, charcoal and dark chocolate. Ezra and I selected prettier colors for the second batch- berry/palest blue (photo), blue/pale blue, camel/camel, black/lt grey, etc.

Knitting in Lima (video)

Here is a short clip of one of our knitters working at his handloom knitting machine.

Product Development Trenches

It's been a busy couple of weeks- making the push to ready samples for a private label customer. Some of the designs are very time-consuming for the knitters, so it's been a learning process for everyone involved. It's always fun to make something new. Although that's easy for me to say since I'm not the one manipulating the knitting machine (see video). The first design took 1500 minutes of knitting time (that's over three full days, with no distractions, breaks or interruptions- so more like five actual days just knitting one garment). They are beautiful, but rather expensive, so in the end they may not even be commercially viable. We are now making the second versions- streamlining the design to reduce production time and raw material requirements.