Felt across the line: the Kara-Suu cooperatives

KARA-SUU VALLEY — In a stone winter house in the upper Kara-Suu valley, five women kneel on a reed mat, rolling a bundle of wet wool back and forth with their forearms. By evening it will be felt. By summer, cut, stitched and dyed crimson and white, it will be a shyrdak on the floor of a flat in Talas, or in a shop in Europe or North America.

The workshop is one of about thirty village workshops in the Talas Alatau linked by the Ak Kiyiz ("white felt") cooperative, which Klara Zhumabek kyzy founded in the valley in 2005. Its members buy coarse wool from the highland flocks, make carpets, saddlecloths and other felt goods, and send them with traders across the Qara-Chik line for sale in Talas and to fair-trade importers abroad.

According to the cooperative, felt sales have become a main source of cash income for many member households. "A carpet sold in Talas buys flour, school shoes and diesel for the winter," said Ms. Zhumabek kyzy, the younger sister of the Tanıp chieftain Bektur Zhumabek uulu. "And the woman who made it knows what it earned."

She has also argued in public that women should have a voice in clan assemblies. Since last year a women's council has sent written petitions to the Kurultai. "It is a start," said Aidana Sagynbek kyzy, who runs one of the workshops. "Felt is also made one layer at a time."