“When we have the opportunity to export the yarn, we’ll have a greater income to invest in our children and maintain our families. Through the training, we are improving our professional skills.”
The Puskariy Tika Spinners create beautiful handspun alpaca yarn. We’ve recently seen an increased interest in yarn from customers who want to buy yarn for knitting. Awamaki aims to sell the handspun yarn in our store in Peru, and to correctly package, label and tag so that we could also add it to our export collection.
This yarn is a unique, chunky, minimally-processed yarn. Awamaki buys alpaca fiber from our artisan partners who herd alpaca, then the Puskariy Tika Spinners clean and spin the fiber by hand. Most commercial fiber is submerged in a hot chemical bath to dissolve grass, dirt, and other natural materials found in raw fleece, then dried with heat in a resource-intensive process. Commercial dyes can use toxic chemicals to fix bright colors. Unlike commercial yarn, our handspun yarn is washed with soap and rinsed, then cleaned by hand, then spun on a traditional spindle.
For years, with support and training from Awamaki, the Puskariy Tika cooperative has been processing and spinning raw alpaca fleece by hand into a soft, chunky yarn. The yarn is fully hand processed and undyed. Now, Puskariy Tika and Awamaki are hoping to finally make that yarn available for export, but to do so, we will need specialized help to correctly label and tag the yarn for knitters’ use.
With the training to ensure accuracy of the yarn production on the horizon, we asked some of the Puskariy Tika artisans about their personal goals regarding this project.
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