Greetings from Montevideo, from Alison Schwabe, Aussie quiltmaker

The prettiest bathroom I encountered on our travels was certainly this one at the temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel, Upper Egypt, We arrived after several hours on the road, early in the morning, just as other buses in the convoy were pulling in. It was peak traffice time at all the loos. The building is a lovely modern facitility but with the usual design problem of the architect not addressing the different time needs of male and female loo users - there was chaos in the narrow corridor from which both loos opened off. There seemed to be a male and female attandant adding to this general clogup, or backup. Our guide, noting the lineup at the ladies' managed to arrange for myself and some other waiting women to go into the near empty men's. We politely ignored the backs of urinating males as we hurriedly washed hands and headed out, but not before I noticed that it was clean, functional and did not pong. At the end of our time there before our return journey of several hours, so like the good traveller I am, I went again, this time into the now less chaotic ladies'. Clean, fully functinonal, and even a couple of containers of room deodoriser to hand, this one showed the touch of someone dedicated to her work. Being a loo attendant is probably mostly thankless and often unpleasant I imagine. This lady shares with an attendant in the Mercado del Puerto a cheerful dispositon and pride in a well maintained facility.

During our journey we came across the full spectrum of toilets, ranging from clean, shiny, modern, spacious and ventilated to cramped, dirty, smelly, seatless, doorless, ancient, and all possible combinations of the above. On our camping trip of course, we went perched behind a rock with breathtaking views all round, but requiring balancing and digging skills. There were plenty of stones around to make a little cairn above my copralite.

We in first world countries have been spoiled by ablution arrangements, and when we encounter what we feel are appalling bathroom standards we don't understand that the differences are more than just about cost or unavailability of toilet cleaners and brushes. From the train between Luxor and Cairo, as the dawn rose we saw several people squatting within metres of the canal and defaecating in plain public view. It's a matter-of-factness about bodily functions which we have been raised to hide and cover up with spray-pak deodorisers. If travel doesn't actually broaden the mind, it certainly reminds us of how unequal Life is.

A highlight of our trip to Egypt was going to the area of the khan where these traditional craftsmen work and sell what they and others behind the scenes sew, traditionally tents and the colourful hangings that line them. I refer you right now to the blog by Jenny Bowker, http://jennybowker.blogspot.com posting August 2nd 2007 for some fabulous examples of the work by this dwindling group of people. The largest pieces are over 2m dimensions, and they are quite used to producing works much larger too - we saw one piece being commissioned as part of a large set of hangings(99) and it was about 1.5m x 3? 4? m length.

My pictures show: UL Ashraf seated cross-legged in front of samples of what he has designed and made or had some others make - he is a caligrpaher also, a passionate one, and this shows in some of his designs he explained to us, outlining the koranic content of the design. The protection of individual or special and innovative designs is important, a number of times we were shown pieces by people holding them up with their plain backs to the street and the curious eyes of nearby compeitors. UR is a closeup of the piece in Ashraf's quick and nimble hands. What a wonderful person to meet and talk with, as were all the people we met in this expedition which took us around just some of the stands where Jenny is clearly a popular friend. We were made very welcome and felt very priveleged. LL is a shop set up as a tent, with a young boy sewing the traditional trimmings with tent lining designs on printed fabric, and many of which will be used to decorate homes and surroundings in the current season of Ramadan. LR shows one way the hangings were/are used -as windbreaks in the desert. I took this photo on our expedition to the Western Desert, organised by Jenny and i naddition to my DH there were a couple of other Australian quilters, Gloria Loughman and Sharon Hall plus DHs, and Esterita Austin from the USA. Our Bedouin guides are setting up the resting/sitting/optional sleeping area in a U-shape formed by the vehicles, lined up against the prevailing wind. The posts on which the fabrics are mounted are unrolled, the ends put in the sand, and the lower edges have sand shovelled up over them, then the huge colourful rag rugs laid down. All done in about 10 minutes. Most of us opted to sleep out under the stars on mattresses on the sand - one or two crept back into the sheltered area during the night as the wind rose a little. I slept out all night and awoke a couple of times in the moonlight after 2-30 am - and then again to see the early dawn and watch the sun appear. At this time, too, a little desert fox, fenneq, was busily scouting our camping area to make sure nothing by way of scraps from the previous night had escaped his notice. DH took a great photo which I might post some time.

The impossible competition from printed fabrics is causing the tentmakers' number to fall dramatically. Tourism which has not yet recognised the value of this traditional craft, clearly offers hope. Readers of Jenny's blog know that the exhibition she took to Australia earlier this year was a smash hit, and everything sold. Their art was greated with great admiration. She is currently doing a similar trip to France (read the frustrations of obtaining customs clearance etc in her most recent post) and no doubt when she returns home later this week will get to her blog and report another huge success. Through these exhibitions and the production of the book she has in the pipeline about their work, Jenny aims to raise the level of recognition so that one day arriving visitors will ask their guides and their hotels "Where do we find the Tentmakers?" and, that hotels and guides will know where to take or to direct them, of course.

As I said in the previous post, the cords then go on to the clothing manufacturers, but they can be obtained out in the open market, too - this glorious riot of colour caught my eye as we were headed towards the tentmakers. Heaps of the hanks we had seen being spun were stacked on the shelf in this little shop.



The shopkeeper here is reaching for garlands of what look like beads, but they are the silk covered forms that act as buttons on the gebalayas, matching the trim around the neck usually and they must wear pretty well, although I note one or two in the pic below are fraying. Since the stranded silk the spinners twist together is imported now from Japan, I imagine these little bobbles are, too. The shopkeeper was rather amazed that I wanted to buy some, but how could I resist? I have no idea what I will do with them but no matter - they are beautiful. Jenny said she'd not seen them before except actually in use on garments.




After our visit to one of the bead shops I did think of interspersing them into a bead necklace or something, they'd look great, but as Jenny pointed out they just might fray fast between glass beads especially. I might risk it sometime though.

Labels: beads, Cairo, silk, trims

The City of the Dead - sounds awful but isn't - bodies are laid to rest in underground tombs and the caretakers of these tombs live on site, and since they like all people have married and produced families down the years, a whole city, town, has built up of people living here. Some of the tombs display faded grandeur from centuries back and are in a state of decay and are overgrown.... We went into one courtyard behind one of these walls -and although it looked like anyone else's courtyard anywhere else in the world - paved with tiles of granito, several plants in pots arranged around, and one or two plastic chairs, there was one freshly cemented area of tiles that Jenny pointed out. These would have been lifted, the underlying panel taken out and the steps going dosn into the tombs were then ready to admit an incoming body, which is laid there on the earth, wrapped in it shroud and left to decompose. It is a quiet place with very little traffic, a sound refuge from the greater city of Cairo itself, let me tell you!

By the time of our visit, mid morning, anyone who could do so was seeking shade, and I suspect this spinner packed it in for a few hours after we left, too -he would have resumed in the evening to work several hours after sundown. People who live there or go into that part of the city know of the work which requires lengths of the silk thread to be run out back and forth between the spinner's stand ULpic, and a T-shaped stand you can't see under the distant tree in the LR pic; and they know to be on the lookout for these strands crossing through an intersection or two - they duck under - and for vehicles the whole array is lifted up to allow them to pass under without breaking the strands of the cord in progress - see the control wires in LR pic. I have often made small lengths of customised cord to trim a project, looping threads over something stable and unyeilding like a door handle or my sewing machine, and this is exactly the same principle but on a much larger scale.

What a marvel of recycling the spinners' stands are. We saw lots of them around the streets here, each a little different but all the same principle and all cleverly constructed from discarded timber and metal.

When the strands are all laid out, they are then twisted together by the spinner turning the bicycle wheel. As the cord twists it becomes tighter and shorter, and the spinner deftly 'walks' his 3-legged stand forward along the sandy street until it reaches the predermined point where he stops - the twist will be correct at this point. It looks easy as he does it, LL, but as you might sense from my pic UR, I found it wasn't. The end product is firmly twisted cord, probably about 250m, perhaps 300m length, and these cords are deftly wound off using the X-shaped wooden structure in UL, and tied into the hanks you see hanging off the equipment in LL. The hanks then go on to clothing manufacturers to be couched onto and decorate clothing and household items, sometimes simply other times quite elaborately.