Two weekends ago we went to a village, Teotitlan, which is one of the local weaving centers as part of a tour led by a group called InvesTours. InvesTours is a local organization that organizes tours to local villages and uses 100% of the tour fees to make interest-free micro finance loans to groups of three women in a village. InvesTours helps the women organize themselves into groups and focus on goals for their enterprises (weaving in this instance). The tour takes you to two groups and afterwards the tour participants decide which group needs the money more or is better able to pay it back and so on.
The tour takes you directly to the homes/businesses of each of the women and they explain their business and what they plan to use the loan for. The loan system is set up so that each group gets an initial relatively small loan of 1350pesos to each woman. This is then paid back within the time frame decided upon by the group and InvesTours at which time the group is eligible for a second loan which is 1000pesos larger than the first and so on until they have built up their business and reached the goal they set.
Typically the goals take a couple of years to achieve since the income from the weaving is relatively small. For example one of the trou participants bought a rug for 600 pesos, 200 pesos of which was the wool leaving only 400 pesos for income. There is also a cost to dye the wool (say 50 pesos) leaving a net income of 350 pesos for 40 hours worth of weaving time. Now to be fair my supposition is that in this particular instance the rug was sold for less than it was worth to help encourage us to loan this group the money as opposed to the other group.
It was a fun trip, nice to get close up to the actual weavers instead of going to a big shop packed with rugs where the bulk of the money goes to the middle men and not the weavers.
In general the looms cost around 10,000 pesos which at the current exchange rate is about $850 and will last a lifetime if well maintained. There are a variety of sizes of loom used to make wider or narrower rugs (tapetes in Spanish). Besides rugs the weavers are also producing bags (such as handbags) of various sizes, table runners, placemats and so on.
The wool comes as undyed yarn direct from the villages in the mountains that raise the sheep as opposed to the old way wherein the weavers actually carded and spun the wool (see first photo for a demonstration). The villages in the mountains nearby have organized and bought themselves machines to mechanize the carding/spinning processes (thanks to government loans/grants).
A lot of the dyeing these days is done with synthetic dyes as they are cheaper, more controllable and overall take less time than traditional dyeing methods. There is a move to get the weavers to use traditional dyeing methods to raise the cachet of the local weavers but the prices will need to go up for this to be viable.
If you are visiting the Oaxaca area this is a fun tour to take (http://www.investours.org) and helps the local populations directly.
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