Now That's Handmade!

One day our friend took us to a hilltribe village of the Chill people. We were particularly interested in weaving so he took us to the home of a woman who is one of two people left who know how to do the entire process from beginning to end. Her work is museum quality and the piece we eventually bought takes a month to complete.
She grows the cotton outside her back door and when it's ready to harvest it's dried for ten days. She then runs the cotton balls through a hand cranked, wooden tool that takes the seed out fromthe middle of the ball. She then cards the cotton on a stick over a flat basket to ready it for spinning. Next she gets out her spinning wheel. The wheel blew me away because she had to crank with one hand while feeding it onto the bobbin to spin.The cotton thread was spun really fine. She did all this on the mud floor of her home which was a metal hut of sorts with a fire burning at one end for cooking. It was seriously hot in there!
While the cotton was drying she gathered the materials from four plants for dying. The color was set by using the ground up shell of a snail.
Swove the piece n a loom like the one her daughter is using on the first picture. The material is mostly unpatterned except for bands which have symbols representing important things in her culture.. They are an ax, eye of birds , ladders,temples, boats, traps, bow and arrows and turtles.
We felt really fortunate to be able to buy a piece as she only produces a few each year. Her daughter has never learned to spin and dye and uses commercial cotton to weave. The last pictures were of us admiring the piece when we got home.