WINOOSKI – Sita Luitel was all smiles as she pointed out the two strips of woven cloth she created.
“It makes me happy,” said Luitel, 66, in Nepali, with her daughter translating, as she ran her fingers over one of the long striped multicolored pieces.
This was her first time weaving on a hand loom, she said, it feels good and brings back old memories but she has back problems so she isn’t sure she can continue it.
“I love all the colors,” said Hari Luitel, 25, admiring her mother’s work at the Winooski Senior Center Thursday, where strips of colorful weaves made by women in a recent workshop were exhibited.
The Luitels came to Vermont 14 years ago from a refugee camp in Nepal. Hari said she has fond memories of Nepali women gathering to knit colorful sweaters, shawls, blankets, even rugs for their families in the refugee camps, where they didn’t have a lot of options and couldn’t afford to buy such items.
“It brought me joy to see how much they enjoyed it,” Hari said.
That connection to country and community was nurtured and celebrated in backstrap weaving classes held twice a week in May and June at the Winooski Senior Center, in collaboration with the Heritage Winooski Mill Museum.
The free activity drew 14 seniors from across Chittenden County, including a small group of Nepali women, who learned how to wrap yarn and weave long strips on small hand looms in colors that represent a timeline of their lives, said Miriam Block, executive director of the museum.
“That got a little complicated with the language gap, so we focused on colors from places they lived in,” she said.
Block has a background in textile design and took on a teaching artist role for the summer program. She used a traditional backstrap loom that literally ties the weaver to the craft.
“You could see the pride when people came in to watch their family members weave the way they had weaved in Nepal,” she said. “They weaved together in the refugee camps but many of them forgot it.”
Photo by Auditi Guha/VTDigger
There has been a lot of interest in the Nepali-Bhutanese community about such crafts, according to Block. Last year, some of them participated in a quilting project, each making colorful squares they stitched into a larger piece, which is now displayed in the senior center. Some were quite skilled in tapestry making, Black said.
The project drew their families to the mill museum to learn about the French Canadian immigrants who came to work there a century ago, and they were excited to make the cultural connection, she added.
It’s been particularly heartwarming to see multigenerational families stroll through the doors to watch or weave this year, said Barbara Pitfido, program director at the Winooski Senior Center.
What started as a fun summer activity grew into something deeper, she said, giving participants a space for connection and creativity, helping them learn or hone a skill and resurrect techniques and memories. Some of the women have taken home the mini looms provided during the project so they can continue weaving.
On Thursday they celebrated the culmination of the weaving project with Nepali and Indian food for lunch.
In Vermont for a decade, Beli Wagley from Colchester said she enjoyed watching her aunties knit. She fingered the familiar patterns on the strips exhibited on a white wall and said it reminded her of the vibrant colors they weaved and wore years ago in Nepal.
“Just by looking at it I can tell the pattern is from Nepal,” she said.
One of the weaves hung on the wall is particularly special, with green and red triangles alluding to Nepal’s flag and the Himalayas, said Wagley, who didn’t participate in the project but came to see what her aunties created. The familiar patterns are reminiscent of how women would weave hats and scarves back home in Nepal.
Photo by Auditi Guha/VTDigger
Some of the colors and shapes are great to make for Vermonters, especially at Christmas, she said, pointing at the mountain-like patterns in the weave made by her aunt Chhali Poudel, 61, who came to the Green Mountain State about a decade ago and lives in Winooski.
Nepal’s flag is the only non-rectangular one in the world, made up of two red pennants with a crescent moon and a sun, bordered by a thin blue line.
Another weaver, Chhali Khadka of Burlington, said, via translation, that she was happy to participate in the project. Khadka, 64, lives in Burlington and came to Vermont 13 years ago via the refugee resettlement program. She used to weave a long time ago and it reminded her of home. She’d like to continue it, but her fingers are too stiff, she said.
Bhutanese refugees of Nepali descent first started to relocate to Vermont around 2008. They were part of a larger diaspora who were forced out of Bhutan amid political violence and ethnic cleansing in the early 1990s and lived in refugee camps in Nepal for nearly two decades before the resettlement efforts. More than 90,000 have been resettled in the United States, The Guardian reported.
As the Trump administration amplifies efforts to crack down on migration, some resettled Nepalis targeted with deportation are once again facing uncertainty and statelessness, according to the Guardian.
Thousands of miles away from the camps, many of the older residents struggle with language barriers and often stay home, isolated and unconnected to the greater Vermont community as they have to depend on family members for rides, said Pitfido. So it was wonderful to have a program that provided materials, transportation and food for a few weeks, she said.
“We are used to working on a shoestring budget, but it was nice to have the right equipment and culturally connected food to bring it all together,” she said.
At the exhibition Thursday, Nepali families shared a buffet of daal, fritters, noodles and more. Food was ordered from the Everest restaurant in South Burlington and cooked by area seniors in the kitchen.
The food, the clothes and the weaves all brought splashes of color to the hall in the senior center.
Some of the Nepali women wore traditional clothing like colorful skirts, sarees and warm fleeces in a bright mix of East and West. Some wore gold hoops, large nose rings and had streaks of red vermillion on their foreheads, a symbol of married Hindu women.
They chatted in Nepali, ate Indian food on plastic-covered American picnic tables, in a rare show of ease, joy and shared camaraderie in a place they now call home.
Arts projects like these help residents from different cultures find community and connection and help to build resilience. Block said she hopes they will continue to take advantage of such programs.
The mill museum will offer free natural dye workshops this summer at the senior center on Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to noon. Residents can sign up to learn to dye with marigolds on June 18 and 25, use fresh indigo on Aug. 13 and learn about natural dyes with a garden walk on Aug. 20.
The program was supported by Age Well Vermont, which has funded lunch at the senior center via a federal grant for new Americans. The arts program was funded by a $4,000 creative aging grant from the Vermont Arts Council.
The Arts Council has dedicated approximately $100,000 toward creative aging projects since 2021 and has been distributing money to senior centers, libraries and arts entities across Vermont to encourage arts activities for adults aged 60+, said Troy Hickman, arts education programs manager at the council.
The grant cycle will open in August and he encouraged other entities that support senior programs to apply.
