Chinara, her aunt Roza Makashova, and her sister-in-law Nazgul Esenbaeva-all young, ambitious, creative-sought sustainable career paths in an uncertain world. Jobs that existed under communism had gone away. The Soviet Union had fallen a few years prior and the economy along with it. When Makashova graduated from university in Bishkek in 1994, the world around her was in upheaval. Crafts, like felting, were at risk of being completely lost in the name of progress. Many of the old ways were slowly forgotten to make way for the new. But under Soviet rule, much of Kyrgyz culture was Russified. The tradition of felting, in particular, was passed from mother to daughter. Nomadic life relied on the oral transfer of knowledge to survive. Long, sturdy wool fibers lend themselves to high-quality felt, Makashova explains. Experiencing the extremes of peak and pasture every season makes their wool thick, strong, and luscious. But in the summers, many shepherds still drive their flocks from the Tian Shan’s valleys to high altitudes, where their fleece grows densely to protect them from the cold. Most modern Kyrgyz shepherds are no longer nomadic. For 75 years, Kyrgyzstan struggled to maintain a separate national identity within the Soviet Union’s Byzantine system of republics and states, and it remained a part of the former superpower until its collapse in 1992. In 1876, it was annexed into the Russian Empire and served as a remote colonial outpost until the founding of the USSR in 1917. About the size of Nebraska, the nation has long been coveted for its vast natural resources and abundant farmland-as a result, it’s seen its fair share of conquerors over the centuries from Ottoman Turks to Mongol hordes to Qing Dynasty imperialists. Home to nearly 7 million people, Kyrgyzstan is a swath of green in the heart of arid Central Asia. Vendors sell shoro-a fermented barley and milk drink-out of blue coolers at little kiosks on almost every street corner. In the downtown district around the restaurant, soldiers in uniform stand on street corners next to young women in hijabs and older women in babushkas. Rather, Bishkek is characterized by cool, tree-lined boulevards, the scraggly rose bushes of its public parks, Soviet-era plazas, and imposing brutalist architecture. Here, there are no ancient stone buildings or cobblestone streets or tourist-swarmed historic districts. We’re in the capital city of Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek, near the Kazakhstan border. On the table are beets, borscht, all manner of fried bread, and no shortage of meat. One depicts buzkashi, a Central Asian sport similar to polo, that involves men on horseback chasing after the headless corpse of a goat in place of a ball. On the walls around us are large, framed, felted artworks. We’re here to eat, but we’re also here to talk about the country’s storied history, which is intricately intertwined with shepherds, sheep, wool, and mutton. Next, the wool is spun into yarn, which can be processed differently to create thinner or thicker yarn.On a slightly overcast day, felt artisan Chinara Makashova and I sit together in Restoran Pishpek, a bistro built to resemble a 19th-century fortress. Carding is a process in which the fibers are pulled through a fine metal comb-like tool that straightens out the naturally curly fibers. After shearing, the wool is washed and then carded. “Everybody is part of this group called LocalFiber and it’s a networking group of farmers and artisans just trying to connect people with the fiber to people who want to use the fiber.”Ītkins explained that there are more than 200 different breeds of sheep and that the production process begins after the wool is shorn off the sheep. “We’ve been so busy here that originally we couldn’t keep up - we invited more people to come,” Atkins said. Members from each participating farm will take turns staffing the pop-up until it closes Dec. Previously, LocalFiber’s pop-up was located in Home Green Home on The Commons in 2019, and in 2020, due to COVID-19, reduced to just five participants and housed in a Groton small business. According to data from a USDA-NASS survey, there are 180 fiber-producing farms located within the 14-county Finger Lakes area. Upon moving to the area, she found it difficult to locate farms that raise, produce and source wool-to-hand fleece. LocalFiber was founded in 2017 by Dana Havas, a Cornell University graduate student of applied economics focusing her research on the fiber-to-textile supply chain.
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