Hah! I finally found a blog by an expat mother in Kyrgyzstan.
I also found some sites about textiles in Kyrgyzstan (actually, this one is about animals, but discusses textiles too). Since I'm a handspinner, I'm rather interested in textiles and the methods people use to make clothes and blankets. In Central Asia, people also use textiles for the walls of their yurts or gers.
One of the most famous Kyrgyz textiles is the shyrdak. It is an appliqued felt carpet. Large pieces of wool are felted, then a pattern is cut out and appliqued onto another piece of felt. The remaining pieces of felt are appliqued onto another piece of felt, so you get two shyrdaks that are mirror images. It takes months to make a shyrdak, but they are sturdy enough to last many years.
They also spin wool using an iyik, or hand spindle. My husband picked up a couple of spindles for me in Egypt (he had quite a time finding anyone that still spun wool in Cairo), but they weren't as easy for me to use as my hand spindle. It is interesting to see the different ways people have come up with to use wool.
2 comments:
Neat. If you go to Kyrgyzstan, be sure to bring back textiles as gifts for your friends and family! I really love the suzani my sister brought me from Uzbekistan! They look sort of like the picture here: http://www.harleytourism.com/img/culture13.jpg
except two of them are pink/red/orange/blue/green/purple/white on black, and the other is purple/white/pink/yellow on green.
A Russian friend from Uzbekistan gave us a suzani, but it isn't as nice as the one pictured in the website you mentioned. I'd like to be able to choose our own this time. Or maybe I'll just learn how to make one myself.
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