Alfombras Are To Dye For

Let's just say we have been very busy. Yesterday we were able to not only catch our breath, but catch up on some sleep, some shopping, some site seeing, mailing postcards, etc.

You may be wondering what our alfombra is going to look like. Here is a sketch made by Emily C.


When looking at photos of Antigua we were inspired by the architecture we saw. We divided the center of our alfombra into three main sections featuring one of the three nearby volcanos, an octagonal rose window shape taken from the La Merced church, and the quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala. The overall shape of the alfombra was inspired by the Arch of Santa Catalina. Surrounding these sections will be a thin solid border in dark green. The larger outside border of bright gold will feature a geometric pattern taken from a huipil we looked at for inspiration in the Mesoamerican Center offices at UT.

One main thing we did yesterday was dye our sawdust for our alfombra. Thankfully we had some fantastic teachers, Marlon and Jose, who both work at the Casa. We set up a workshop area with tarps, buckets, tubs, dyes, sawdust, and plastic gloves. The gloves proved to be essential for keeping the dye off our hands, even though a few of us managed to have some green and pink fingers by the time we were finished.

First the 60lb bag of sawdust was divided into 4 big tubs. A 1/2 gallon of hot water was mixed with 1 ounce of dye. Marlon mixed the dye and water by shaking it in an old fabric softener container. Then a 1/2 gallon of cold water was added to the mixture. We were making a double batch of "aqua" so we used 2 ounces of dye mixed with an additional gallon of water in the fabric softener jug.

After the dye was mixed with water it was poured evenly into the buckets. Not all of it but enough to start to color the sawdust. There were about 2 of us per bucket. It was sort of a stir/mix with your hands while rubbing your hands with sawdust in the middle to distribute the color. Constantly stirring and rubbing the sawdust. Every once in a while we'd find a color ball towards the bottom.

At first the sawdust was really powdery and easy filled the air. After the dye was added to the sawdust, the sawdust was weighted down and didn't fly as much. It was a slow process having the pale yellow sawdust turn to the dye color we added. Every once in a while Marlon would add more dye to our buckets to try to even out the color. Through this process, we realized that dying the sawdust wasn't an exact science and that the color we hoped for might not be exactly what we ended up with in the buckets.

After we had mixed the dye and sawdust completely in our buckets, Marlon dumped the sawdust onto a tarp so that we could then mix all buckets together to make sure the color was uniform. It became a friendly contest to see if there was any uncolored sawdust in our buckets. Towards the end I think we figured out a mixing process that worked, by gradually working our way around the bucket going all the way to bottom. The consistency was a like soft, moist, fluffy sand. After that we shoveled the sawdust into bags to wait until Thursday when we would make the alfombra.

We had some additionally hands helping us too: Milady, Anna Milady (Milady's mom), Juan (Milday's dad), and our Casa guard Don Jose. Milady's parents are visiting for Holy Week and have joined us on several parts of trip.

The colors we made were a faded emerald green (aka"aqua"), emerald green (another color supposed to be blue), burnt orange, and dark hot pink color. Marlon and Jose had already dyed royal purple (which is going to be the main background of the center of our carpet) and a golden yellow for us before we arrived.

Today we are going to dye black for the volcano. Grey dye is not made but Marlon suggested we use tiny pieces of aluminum foil to act as grey or mix the black sawdust with lighter colored sand. We also still have a fuchsia color and lime color that we need to finish before Thursday. Now that we have the process down it will be easy to dye those colors.