Luna Sundara is proud to work with the community of San Lorenzo in the Peruvian Amazon. Earlier in 2021, we met Raquel Inuma and a community of women that handcraft “Chambira bags and baskets” made out of palm leaves.
The process:
- To make these beautiful bags, the artisans cut the tender and inner part of the palm called “cogollo” then they take off the fiber and proceed to fray it. After doing this, the leaves are boiled for 20 minutes, rinsed, and then the water lets the fibers dry for three days. After those days, we start to create natural ink.
- The ink:
- Achiote (Bixa orellana)
It’s a brush seed that grows in tropical areas and with the Achiote, we obtain the color Orange. We have to boil the seeds for 20 minutes and then let them cool off.
-Azúl de Huito (Genipa americana): The huito is a fruit and it provides the blue color. The huito seeds are boiled for 20 minutes, after this the blue color will be obtained.
- Tariri: it’s a plant in a rope shape. We boil the leaves for 20 minutes to get the color burgundy.
- Misquipanga (Renealmia alpinia): This plant looks like the corn leaves. We take the fruit seeds, ground them, and boil for 20 minutes. Then we let this water cool for 6 hours to have the navy color. Also to have the purple color we let the same water for 12 hours.
- Guisador: It’s a healing plant like the potato. We boil that plant for 20 minutes and after cool we obtain the yellow color and if we let it rest for the extra time we will have the color lemon green.
- Guacamayo Caspi: native tree from the amazonian forest. The flowers are dioecious. To obtain the color pink we boil the female flowers for 20 minutes. We boil the male flowers to have the color grey.
- After obtaining the different ink colors we proceed with painting the fibers. Then we let them dry for 1 day and after that, we started to weave the baskets and bags.