This montage of photos tells the visual story of developing a traditional village art to high-quality products for export to the boutiques of the world. When I traveled to Santiago Atitlan, a remote village in the mountains of Guatemala, I saw a local weaving product then sold to local and international Catholic groups. Working with the weavers, I introduced new products, developed new techniques, and designed for export only. This montage shows the success of one product creating an interlocking line of products. A design, the Triangle Snake, succeeded with North American shops and an international catalog. Orders flowed to a few families of weavers. Other weavers saw the sudden money and wanted work also. However, the 5 inch wide Triangle Snake required strong men to weave the wide belt. I did the obvious -- I reduced the width of the design to 3 inches, then 2 inches, then 1 inch. Widows could weave during the day as they cared for their children. Teenagers -- young men and women -- could weave several belts a day. No longer did the families need to work the plantations on the Pacific Coast -- or the slums of the capital city. And attention to detail and the purchase of first quality thread produced the highest quality Guatemalan belts on the market. Go to giftofinfinitecolors.com for an illustrated text of the development. Experienced, highly-motivated artists created quality work for export to the world. Working with the designs and innovations I developed, the village weavers exported direct to my design center in the United States. From there, I shipped the products to shops throughout North America. Resort shops sold the products to tourists from other wealthy nations. Catalogs sold the products to customers throughout the world. Sales returned dollar earnings to the village. The dollar earnings made the weavers the highest-paid workers in the village. Money from the business paid for the education of their children, medicines for their families, purchases of land, and start-ups of other businesses. Go to giftofinfinitecolors.com to see other stories told through Flash videos. When I traveled in Morocco and Syria, I saw opportunities to repeat this success. I can work in villages and send the production to Europe and the United States. The people of the villages will receive their earnings in Dollars and Euros. The earnings will honor the traditional arts and the young men and women of the village will see an alternative to leaving the village for the cities to search for minimum wage work. I did this before in a village speaking Spanish and Tzutujil. I can repeat the success in an Arabic-speaking village. I explain the process in English and Arabic in the story section of giftofinfinitecolors. (Drawings done with ink and straight-edge, later with vector graphics. Juan Pablo and his wife and baby photographed with a Canon film camera. Drawings and photos scanned via Canon LIDE 500 to PhotoShop, assembled in Flash, exported to Adobe Premiere, then YouTube.) (Designs copyrighted in the United States and Guatemala.)

 

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