Mexican Inspired Chimayos
These two pieces are closely related in their underlying inspiration. That is, they are inspired by learning from Mexican weavers and historic Mexican textiles.
When I first started weaving I naturally focused on learning about Chimayo weavings and all of the bigger Rio Grande weaving tradition. I vaguely knew that our histories were linked, but didn't think a whole lot about the connections to the many regional weaving traditions in Mexico. I conceptualized the Saltillo style and tapestry techniques as being a critical "root" of our tradition, something that was a long ago influence, from the Bazan Brothers at the beginning of the 19th century. As I have learned more about the early days of Chimayo weaving I'm realizing there were some very important weavers who had come up from Mexico with great influence. One day I hope there will be better documentation of those folks and their contribution to our tradition.
In 2024 we spent a week with a Saltillo weaver from Tlaxcala, Ignacio (Nacho) Netzahualcoyotl. We visited museums and a spectacular private collection, and spent time dyeing and weaving. We spent time talking about design and how to communicate design to other weavers. He has a very sophisticated approach to this that he has developed. In the context of our business here, communicating about design with other weavers is something we mostly do with pictures, and not with the kind of precision that his approach brings.
But another thing that we talked about were the "elements" we work with. Saltillos do have some oft-repeated elements put together in different ways. If you have read my Chimayo book, I kinda boil things down to angles and progressions more than elements, but I do think that there are elements in Chimayo, mainly parallelograms and chevrons.
In any case, our tradition borrowed Saltillo elements long ago, and we spent some time talking about what to call them. This comes from the "bible" of our weaving tradition, "Rio Grande Textiles".
Although we found many similarities in techniques (tapestry weaving) and materials (wool), one big difference is the thickness/fineness of our finished products. Suffice to say that it gets colder here in New Mexico than it does in Tlaxcala, and our weavings really developed out of a need to keep warm. So we weave at 8 ends per inch and Nacho works with far finer yarns at up to 24 ends per inch. Both traditions found ways to do less tapestry work to make it possible to produce a less labor intensive, and thus saleable, product. Saltillo evolved to include a color transitioning stripe pattern that is highly recognizable. When we went down to visit Nacho's family in Contla, they took the time to show us a particular number sequence for this kind of stripe.
When I went to weave something drawing from what I learned from our interactions with Nacho and his family, I had to find a way to weave with a finer yarn and not put on a new warp. So I went to use some fine mohair yarn that we have had for a few years. I used the stripe logic, more or less, that we had learned. I haved observed the two-round jaspes and hourglass elements in both early Chimayos and Saltillos, and the serrated parallelograms that seemed to be important, useful elements I could build with. I then created a Chimayo design from those elements.
In February of 2026, a group of us weavers from New Mexico were hosted by an Arizona Historical Society program, traveling to Oaxaca for an extensive, intensive learning experience. I should probably write more extensively about that trip. Here I just want to write up how I wove my Oaxaca inspired piece.
This time my choice of materials was my undyed handspun churro. There aren't a lot of handspun pieces coming up from Oaxaca, but we did learn about the sheep that grazed the mountains historically, and ran into a couple of spinners. In any case, I didn't want to try to dye yarn especially for the project when I had such lovely colors at hand already.
This time I really wanted to try the different proportion of very wide stripes with a closer-to-square space between them for the center design. Many of the Mexican regional tapestry traditions use this kind of proportion, and I had taken note of that long ago when I was first learning to weave. One of the historic textiles that we visited with at the Franz Meyer Museum in Mexico City was a Texcoco piece that readily demonstrated this proportion, as well as having the S/Z design that's kind of a signature element for that style. It also had some corner designs that I found very appealing.
I wanted to draw on the very close parallels between the designs that I saw in some of the Oaxacan pieces we saw. This picture is of a particularly gorgeous and finely detailed one, along with its makers, who have achieved a mastery of natural dyeing as well as weaving.
I tried a number of smaller elements familiar in these Oaxacan pieces, like the pickup designs that, combined with what we call "paladar", make for some interesting stripe elements that we don't find anywhere in our tradition. Another is the big "piquietos" that resembled some of the warp-faced woven patterns we were taught about.
I think the one thing that maybe all of us who visited with Mexican weavers took note of was that Chimayo weavers are much more apt to take the "move every spool all the way across, all in the same direction" rule far more seriously than our Mexican counterparts. We saw them weaving two or three or even four rounds independently of other colors and I think we all were a bit taken back. Our looms were incredibly similar, our processes and approaches had a whole lot of similarities. But that little difference hit us all as, well, breaking the rules. Weaving is a matter of learning how to think, and in that one little way, we thought differently. Figuring out how that translates to our designs is another question to be pondered.
