Technology Improvements

So, the tradtional method of making felt requires huge amounts of labor, and produces a felt that isn’t of the highest quality. In order to refocus the efforts of our women towards higher value-added activities, we are working to decrease the amount of time spent making felt, allowing for more time turning that felt into handicrafts. The photos here are some of the pieces of technology newly available to some of the groups, mostly provided through grants by the United Nations Development Program and the Asian Development Bank. 

This is the industrial strength machine used to wash the raw felt. Traditional methods involve lots of boiling water poured over a gigantic cauldron of wool. The wool is then allowed to soak, drained, and then washed again. The process is labor intensive, inneficient and the quality is irregular. 

 

This woman is working a machine that takes the clean wool and pulls it apart. This machine accomplishes in minnutes what would otherwise take the women days. The traditional method here would simply be sitting around pulling at the wool until it was spaced far enough apart that it woudl be receptive to the felting process. 

These are bundles of wool both washed and pulled. As you can see, the wool is both white and brown. The brown wool is generally kept in its natural color, as it is not very receptive to dying. However, the light wool is excellent for dying. The wool in this picture is going to be used to make shyrdaks. This is not the Merino wool used for making slippers, laptop sleeves, or other small handicrafts. It is tougher wool from the aboriginal Kyrgyz sheep. This is good because the wool is very hearty, and since it comes from meat sheep, it is very cheap.

This machine turns the wool into felt. You take the wool from the previous picture and put in between the outer casing of that roll and the roll itself. Then you plug it in and get it spinning while pouring scalding hot water. The pressure and the water force the wool to bind, creating felt. This process would otherwise require days on end of kicking a similar contraption rolled behind a donkey. I’m not kidding.

And finally we have a stack of finished felt, and finished shyrdaks! The felt on the left is what comes out of the above pictured rolling machine. It is dark or light, depending on the wool, and, naturally, undyed. Sometimes the felt is used in this natural state, but it is often dyed to bright colors before beind sewn into shyrdaks. The stack on the right is a whole  bunch of shyrdaks, the big Kyrgyz Carpets, traditionally for the floors of the yurt, but today finding new homes on both the floors and walls of many Kyrgyz households.