Crafty Peru

 We recently returned from a trip to Peru.  What a beautiful country!  We were only there for 10 days so barely scratched the surface.  We spent 2 days in Lima and walked all over Miraflores (I see flowers, one of the more affluent neighbourhoods) and also went on a bus/walking tour of old Lima.  We saw many great things but my favourite was the Love Park.  Walls like the ones in the photo covered with tiles and messages of love snake through the park and surround a statue of a couple sharing a passionate kiss.  The park overlooks the Pacific Ocean and is really fun.

After Lima we flew to Cuzco, got altitude sickness, took the pills and felt better, then went on to the Sacred Valley.  The Sacred Valley, besides being lovely countryside, is the home to several Inca ruins - we stopped at 2.  More on that in a later post.  It was also home to a little village that had a little demonstration of yarn dying, knitting and weaving.  Gap Adventures sponsors the village and brings tours in.  One woman showed us how the yarn was dyed.  The bowl below is crushed bugs.  The yarn shown here was dyed with crushed bugs plus additives like lemon juice and salt.

 The women were also spinning with drop spindles, knitting and weaving.  I, in geek-like fashion, pulled out my knitting to show them too.

There was also, of course, a market where they had lovely finished products.  We bought a few things and thoroughly enjoyed talking to the ladies.  We realized quickly that they were very good at sales!  One young girl had an extremely cute puppy which they skillfully incorporated into the sales process.  I loved every minute of this place and could have stayed longer but we were on a schedule.

The baskets to the right show various fibres by degree of softness - from left to right - vicuna, baby alpaca, alpaca and sheep.  As a knitter, I'm obviously already pretty attuned to the hand feel of yarns but I haven't really spent any time with the raw fibre and touching them one after another really highlighted the differences in softness.

I didn't see much yarn for sale on my trip - mostly finished goods in the tourist-focused places we visited.  But I did manage to buy enough dk weight for a sweater and a couple of nice skeins of a variegated yarn that will be perfect for a scarf.  As I said, we barely scratched the surface.  I'm sure there was more yarn to be found and next trip will find it!