NOW Calling for donations:

 

Weaving a Future is a fundrasing endeavour to help sustain the traditional cultural art of handspinning & weaving in East Timor.

Women's Woven Art is an independently-funded women's cooporative in Dili, employing women from many villages around East Timor to make handwoven traditional tais (taish) cloth, which are handsewn into beautiful marketable designs.

 

 

Women in the sewing workshop make beautiful products from tais and are learning micro-business enterprise. Wooldancer's online shop is currently the only online outlet for WWA Handwoven Art products. Proceeds from tais products are given to each of the women artisans, providing basic food, medicine & education for families & often entire communities. Weavers urgently require updated spinning & weaving equipment.

CALL FOR DONATIONS:

By supplying spinning wheels & weaving equipment to women weavers of East Timor, we can help.

If you wish to donate a handmade item such as handspun yarn, fiber or equipment to be sold for this cause, please contact us. Donations are not limited to textiles. We will gladly accept any handmade products. Thank you.

If you are unable to donate product, you can still help!

Beautiful handwoven bags, scarves, wraps, wallhangings & items for children handmade by Women's Woven Art are now available at store.

East Timor, situated only 400kms above Australia, is the worlds newest country. Women handweavers were forced into buying commercial cotton from Indonesia when the former government pilaged native cotton crops at the turn of the century. As a result, very little handdyed & handspun cotton is carried out, and there is a very real threat to the survival of traditional Timorese spinning arts.

Preserving the textile handcrafts is of dire importance to the East Timorese economy, whose woven arts are a main source of income for many families who live in IDP camps as refugees in their own country.

The idea to begin Weaving a Future fundraiser was initiated when I witnessed the physical feat of Backstrap weaving first hand in 2007. I met with three women from WWA, Palasmina, a Master Weaver; Rohima, WWA Sewing Workshop leader; and Trisha, founder of WWA during an Australian vigil. Thier plight towards self-sufficiency inspired me two-fold: to help support WWA women to generate international trade via the web, and to provide much needed updated spinning & weaving euqipment.

The seed for a fundraiser was also inspired by Therese from jumpsheep.com whose highly successful initiative Charkas For Africa donates spinning equipment to many men & women in Mali.

Our mission is to assit in preserving & supporting communites who, despite hardship, are determined to weave a future for themselves and their culture via handmade textile arts.

We warmly Thank You for your support.

women weaving on a very basic backstrap loom

Contemporary yarn creation & design

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