indigo part 2

Two pieces drying in the shade. Don't dry them in the sun, the wax will melt!











The group, happy with a successful class! Karen E, Cheryl, Bev, Joanne, Kathy and Arianne. You can see the row of fabrics drying in the shade.


















An electric skillet, with melted wax and stamps sitting in the wax.

indigo and batik

Hi,
I'm in Summerville, SC, just outside of Charleston, with five girlfriends for a WEEK of
sewing and fun. Today was just the most perfect day! Joanne arranged for a class with Arianne King-Comer, an indigo batik artist. Arianne is from NY, has travelled to the west African countries where indigo dyeing was born. She has been living in North Charleston for 14 years, after discovering that this area also has a rich history of indigo dyeing. Her artwork is awesome!


She had some fabric and two boxes of awesome stamps for us to play with. Some of the stamps came from the African countries, some came from Read's Fabrics in Charleston. They are carved from wood...the photo of two stamps is to the right. We also used 'paintbrushes' made of chair seat cushion for the free hand part of our experiment.







This is a batik sample Arianne made in a class she took with batik artists in a country that none of us can remember! It is about 10 feet long by about 4 feet wide.











This is Arianne showing us how to use the 'paintbrush'. Notice the necklace she's wearing...it's a traditional memory necklace. It is to remind the wearer to let things go. She adds to a leather strap beads or stones from special places, and when it breaks, it reminds her that we move on.












This is Kathy removing a piece of fabric from the dye bucket.
When the fabric comes out of the bucket, it's green. The color changes once the dye is exposed to the air, changing color in just a few minutes.

Izamal

This is the roof-top patio of our room at the Hotel Macanche in Izamal.
The B&B is a fairyland of gardens, peace and food! Each room is an individual house, built
in the traditional Mayan style. The four of us shared one house, with one bathroom. It was very comfy and very pretty.









Stuart, enjoying an arrival beverage, in the open-air reception, dining room
and gathering area.


My dinner! Oh, what a great restaurant at the Macanche! We ordered our dinners early, and picked our serving time. The kitchen was smaller than the kitchen in my apartment in Merida, and the staff was one woman and her helper. So, guests at the Macanche are assigned meal times, to keep from overloading the cook. This evening, I had a fabulous sopa de poblano, and fish tacos (pictured here). It was the best meal of the trip!



There are only 7 rooms at the Macanche, all tucked into a beautifully planned garden.
Foliage and flowers, trees and a few veggies created a very quiet and private place to
wander or read. The pool was blasted, and the rocky bottom was so pretty, the owners
kept it natural. The water was cool, but it was refreshing. The owners are yoga teachers, and the yoga palapa was beautiful! Emily was away while we were there, but we learned of future yoga retreats on the calender.

The reason to visit Izamal is to see the pretty village which is painted all the same golden color, and to visit one of the oldest pyramids in the Mayan Empire. The village is very small, and quiet. We walked the back streets, and found a some artists at work, carving wood or making papier mache butterflies. There are very few cars or trucks on the streets, everyone gets around either on a bicyle or horse and carriage, which makes the streets very quiet and pedestrian friendly.

We stayed at the lovely Macanche two nights. Salli and Doug headed back towards Cancun, where they are flying back to the States, and Stuart and I caught a bus back to Merida. The four of us had a VERY good time, and agreed that we travel well together!

more Celestun, lunch

Oops.
Mangrove swamp!










Sunday lunch in Merida, with mama, Salli and Doug.

Celestun

Salli and Doug, Sunday in the zocalo! Their first day in Merida, and of course, we enjoyed the street vendors for lunch.










Thursday, Jan 15, 2009
We caught the early bus to Celestun. It's overcast again, heavy dark clouds. Windy, too. This is sssoooo unusual for this time of year! This is the boat/tour guide rental booth on the beach at Celestun. This is a major bird stop-over location for all kinds of fall and spring migrating birds. There is a larger pink flamingo colony here, too. We hired a boat here, with a french couple, and ran south along the coast then up the river and eventually into the magrove forest. We saw many brown pelicans (whose bellies hold more than the billicans!), white pelicans, soprey, ahningas, cormorants, frigates and pink flamingos. And, this is the off season!



Our boat, and Captain, Poni (little horse he told us!).









We stopped at a petrified forest - salt water washed over into the fresh water area in a huge 1980 hurricane. There was quick sand here, too. The most interesting part of the trip was seeing the shrimp fishermen. They were in the river, in water that is chest deep. They have small boats, about 10 feet long maybe. The fishermen get out of the boat, turn the boat sideways to the current, and PUSH the boat against the current, with a net dragging behind them. Walking against the current for three hours at a time. And we think we work hard somedays.

In the mangrove swamp, we say giant termite nests in the trees. There was a cenote, too, where we stopped briefly, to walk on an elevated walkway, to stretch our legs. Some people were swimming, but it was too cool today for me.

When we got back to the beach, three hours later, we ate a delicious lunch of fresh fish and shrimp, and walked in the sand for a while before catching the bus back to Merida. It began raining just as we got on the bus.

rope making machines

Can you tell I found this whole process fascinating?!? Close by the 'machine house', where the leaves were shredded, and the wagons loaded with the wet strands headed for the drying racks, we were led to a new palapa-style building. The new building housed a marvelous collection of antique machines used to make ropes of various sizes. The machines were kept alive and running perfectly by an 81 year old man, who spoke only spoke Mayan, and who had grown up working on this hacienda. Sr. Antonio looked much younger than his age, and was obviously delighted to show off his machines. The first photo is a combing machine. Remember the spikes on a post, where I 'whomped' a handful of hennequin to pull through? Well, this machine does the same task, much faster and in much higher volume. That triangula shaped thing in the bottom of the photo moves in a circular motion, packing down the fluffly hanks.



This machine pulls several hanks of combed
hennequin through, twisting at the same time,
to make small cords. The cords are wound onto
spools, just like the spools we buy in the
hardware or garden store.
















Another rope making machine...the hennequin is being fed from the right of the photo, through spinners, and onto spools. See the spools on the floor at the lower left of the photo?









The big rope machine! From the back, the spools of rope are joined and twisted to make large rope. Sr. Antonio, the Machine Maestro!

Making Rope

I'm back! Back home in North Carolina, and back to my blog. It has been cold here, but the forecast promises us a little more reasonable temps this weekend. The laptop is at GeekGuy's shop, with a certain confidence that it is going to healed. Losing easy communication the last three weeks in Merida proved how much I rely on the internet.

This photo is the fabulous recliner we saw at Hacienda Sotuta de Peon. It TRULY is comfortable...those things my feet are propped on swing around, and tuck underneath the arms of the chair when not in use. I think it is a French design, but don't quote me on that.

The tour of sisal production was much more fascinating to me than the tour of the Big House. Such a labor intensive product, that virtually enslaved Mayan people in a hot, wet, smelly job. It created a product that was highly valued, but the wealth from the product was not very well distributed. Sort of like cotton plantations in the pre-war
southern US. The process uses every part of the plant, even the waste is used as compost.

In a previous post, there are photos of the process at the mill, so these photos show a little more about how the hennequin is used after it is dried.

This photo shows how it was combed, before machines did the work. A handful of dried sisal is 'whomped' across these teeth, and pulled through. It was harder than it looks! And, I learned that the smelly part is not natural: it's diesel fuel. A little bit of diesel makes the raw material easier to handle. Yuck.

After it was combed by hand, then it was spun. A small amount was attched to a spinning wheel. This is a two-man process. This man is feeding small amounts into the spinning wheel, which is being turned by the second man (out of the picture). It is just like spinning wool. This created one small cord, which might have been plied with others of the same size to make larger and larger ropes. It took MUCH space, as the ropes were made to order lengths for sailing ships.


This is the baling machine, which was worked by two men. The combed-but-not-spun raw material was put into a huge box. Then, a big weight was slowly lowered, compressing the sisal into 300 pound bales. Here, the baling man and I were tying it off...a very specific way to tie it!

Sisal was mostly baled and shipped to the manufacturers, in Merida. The machinery was too pricey for each hacienda to own, so the sisal was sold by the pound, and moved by rail to the rope plants.

After the tour of the Big House, the green mill (where the strands were extracted from the leaves), and the baling house, we walked through a small orchard on our way to a collection of machinery the family has collected for display. In the orchard, our guide invited us to pick some tangerines for a snack. There were also lime trees and orange trees.

The next post, I'll show you a little of the antique machinery, which was fascinating!