Spiderweb where eyes get entangled
A gaze-catching trap
Sweet geometry
Arabesque woven with sighs
It is a product of the acculturation of Tenerife lace, reworked and imbued by the environment. It must have been created as a supplementary industry for edgings and lace for religious ornamentation or profane adornment. It is the result of the ingenuity of Paraguayan women in the social impulse of adornment.
It reflects their fine sensibility and portrays the tropical environment in its multiple ranges, capturing in its ranges the flora and fauna, the stars and even the things and objects of daily life. The woman from Itauguá did not limit herself to copying imported lace; she set out to create a new style. It is a creation that was the first to be disseminated worldwide. It is a symbol. The ñandutí weaver is an artist who gathers impressions of nature with her needle, which is like a paintbrush.
All these forms represent something that never lacks significance, captured from the surroundings, from the surrounding world. Ornamentation, rather phytomorphic and stylized. It represents the interests, feelings, and cosmic intuition of a farming culture, of an agrarian economy.
Ñandutí, a Guaraní word meaning "spider's white," is the name given in Paraguay to a needle lace woven by the women of the town. It was not a legacy of pre-Columbian Guaraní-Tupí culture, as the fine needlework was introduced by the Spanish.
Ñandutí lace is similar to Tenerife lace, modified by the ecological and ethnographic factors of Paraguay. A mestizo cultural product like all of Paraguay's rural culture. The warp is acculturation and the weft is indigenous.
