
Emily Trujillo·
Ariat Rio Grande Weaving Apprenticeship
I'm not sure if every Chimayo weaver feels the same, but to me, weaving has to do with the people; community is a big part of it. Every person weaves from their personal experience, their own heart. However, at the end of the day, we all learned from the generations before us and each other. I know we all have something in common: we all have a shared connection to heritage, history, and identity. However, people my age and younger just didn't learn, and so this feeling might not be the same for them. You can ask the locals, and...

Lisa Trujillo·
Flipping Blocks
After the 2021 Spanish Market, I and my loom were ready for a new, big project. I had been doing a lot of spinning from Pat Trujillo's Centinela-grown fleeces, so I had handspun yarn to work with. I perused my Pinterest board and settled on what I eventually named the "overly elaborate tumbling block" pattern for the border. I'm sure I realized it would be a challenge. I thought I was up for it. So I worked with the selection of handspun yarns I had, choosing boldly contrasting ones for the border and center, and some more gently contrasting ones...

Lisa Trujillo·
19, 20, 21
19,20,21-Lisa Trujillo It has been a pandemic year. We have all gone through this year together, apart from each other. What we have felt, all of us living more isolated from one another, but interacting in whole new ways, is probably more alike than different. Our struggles this year have varied tremendously, from terrible suffering and tragic loss, to overwhelming fear, loneliness, or boredom, to an appreciation of things we were previously overlooked. We all had to make sense of things for ourselves. We had closed our doors to customers after one last tour group, on March 11, 2020. We...

Lisa Trujillo·
Weaving Before Your Eyes
There was a documentary project made long ago that sent a videographer to record us working. He talked about doing stop-motion photography for the project, and wouldn’t it be fun to do that with our work. He tried to explain how it would work, with a camera mounted on the loom and shooting frames on a regular basis, but I really didn’t think it was realistic thing for me to try to do. Since then I have learned some rudimentary video editing skills and have thought often about how stop-motion photography could work for me. I had been scheduled to...

Lisa Trujillo·
November Storm
Like every other piece I have ever woven, this piece comes out of the time I created it in. The yarns are all handspun wool, and most are either naturally dyed or are undyed churro. Most of the pinks and the wine colored yarns came out of a friend’s stash of handspun, naturally dyed yarns, that I had bought a year or two before I wove this. The undyed wools are probably all from my sister’s flock of sheep, although I have been known to buy fleeces from other sources too. The fact that I had very limited amounts...

Emily Trujillo·
Have You Heard About Wedding Blankets?
Big news! I got married earlier this month, so today I’m going to tell you about the Frazada de Boda, or, in English: the wedding blanket. I’ll forever remember the scratchy material on my bare shoulders as my father and father-in-law wrapped a blanket around me my now-husband. The sun was beating down on our heads and I closed my eyes to take everything in. It may have been a hot summer day, but my heart was warm from emotion. My dad had spent a month weaving our very own frazada for us, and only now were we allowed to see it. My dad...