Capacity-building for rural women artisans in Peru

Last year Awamaki was able to provide knitting & crocheting workshops to the Awac Phuna and The Puka Rosas artisan cooperatives. Those artisans are now taking and fulfilling orders for Awamaki's most popular knit products, the stuffed animals toys, enhancing their earning potential and equipping them with additional skills for future endeavors.   

Continuing with our focus on sustainability, Sammy, our sustainability designer, is now leading workshops to educate our artisans partners on an environmentally friendly way to stuff the animal toys. All of the textiles utilized in Awamaki’s accessory collection are created with a fringe edge that is discarded in the production of bags and pillow covers. This material is part of all weavings made on the traditional backstrap loom. Using a technique called carding, Sammy developed a way to turn the scraps into a gentle fluff. The process uses a carding brush that breaks down the yarn, making it the perfect non-toxic upcycled stuffing to fill the Awamaki toy collection. 

This zero-waste transition brings Awamaki and the knitters closer to the goal of ensuring a climate-friendly, sustainable production process while strengthening the artisans' earning potential, contributing to their economic independence and stability.  

As we enter into the rainy season in the Andes of Peru, the timing for animal shearing is now. Once a year, during the summer months of December and March, alpacas can be sheared. The rest of the year, the high Andes are too cold for the alpaca to lose their fiber.  Awamaki's partner artisans use the sheared alpaca fiber to spin yarn to knit and weave. We buy this fiber directly from artisan partners who raise alpacas in the remote regions of the Patacancha Valley. Awamaki's local purchase of raw alpaca fiber provides the artisans of this region a reliable additional source of income, and keeps our production process and supply chain as hyperlocal as possible. Purchasing raw fiber also allows us to separate coarse fiber to experiment with creating products made from climate-resilient coarse alpaca fiber.

Finally, to close out 2024, we decided to interview some of our artiisan partners, asking them to share what they are most passionate about and proud of in their work with Awamaki. To hear from the artisans and our team, check out this video. Thank you to you, our donors, for making this work possible!

Links:

• Artisan Interviews