Getting started

Last night we met for the first time with our instructors, Lynda Teller Pete and Barbara Teller Ornelas, two very distinguished from a family that has been weaving ever since the nineteenth-century flowering of the art.  They got us started on the project, with supplies of yarn, graph paper, colored pencils, weaving forks, battens, tools to hold the looms in place and small tools.  They immediately set us to designing our rugs.  We will receive the pre-warped looms today.

The yarn is Lamb's Pride, I chose the colors.  We were advised to use a dark yarn for the background and to avoid heathered yarn for large areas.  Then we were sent off to work.

After several days of looking at rugs, hearing about them from experts, considering purchase, we know far more about them than we did before.  All of which makes the adventure ahead more daunting, not less.

A note on gender.  The Navajos borrowed the weaving from the Pueblos after the Spanish conquest.  But while the Pueblos continued to use cotton, the Navajos adopted wool.  In their society women cared for and owned the sheep, and therefore owned the wool, which they then used.  Men built the looms and made the other tools.  Today weaving remains a predominantly, though not exclusively, female activity among the Navajo.