Flowers Multiply As Spring Nears

There were some direct requests for photos of the embroidery, so in addition to what I had up there before, here are some more.

Project #1: One Flower

This is the same one I included a different picture of in the original post.



Project #2: Three Flowers, With Shading

This is the one I completed over the fall and winter. At a slow and relaxed pace.

This is the sort of abstract style of shading that this studio uses a lot. My teacher showed me a piece from I guess probably 5 years ago that they had done, which was more like my first project, without shading. She commented that they had developed the shading method in response to people's tastes. (She teaches young girls, mainly, but then the studio also accepts orders from brides and people who want holiday doilies and stuff, so I think the more experienced older girls are the ones who work on those projects.) Anyway, I guess this stuff is constantly evolving, as culture does -- even ostensibly "traditional" culture.

As I commented on Flickr, locals prefer brighter colors than I would choose. My teacher also praised these synthetic yarns over natural fiber from the very beginning, because she says they wash better and therefore survive over time. The American students and I who originally started out with the lessons all figured that, since we weren't likely to wash these very often, we'd rather have colors more attractive to our palette, but this was the best we could do.



Project #3: The Race to Navruz

This is the Tajik national dress, or chakkan, that I'm working on now. We are trying to finish this by the Navruz holiday 3 weeks from now. I'm further along than 2 flowers, but I still don't see how it will be done in time.

You can see here that my teacher draws the pattern on the fabric (she has a whole library of patterns to trace from), and then we talk about how I'll fill it in, and then I set to it. (She is helping me a lot with completing the dress, but I still am lobbying for her to lose the Navruz deadline.)

This fabric was apparently something the girls at the studio hadn't seen before. The yarn is all bought by my teacher, but for this I went and cruised the fabric stalls at Green Market to see what I could find that I was least unlikely to wear. Baby blue satin was the best I found, and all the girls oohed and aahed over it as the sewing studio teacher quickly snip-snipped through the much-used pattern for kurta and PJ pants.



The fabric is wicked shiny, so unfortunately my photos of this are coming out badly. I'm not a very good photographer, obviously.

Coda: Suzani

I still really have to dig more to understand the difference between suzani and gulduzi. As I said before, it seems to me that gulduzi describes a method, while suzani describes an object and its function. But I'm still not sure. And part of me is thinking that suzani is one of these words that I keep discovering is really just a Russian colonial word that isn't even used in the Central Asian vernacular (e.g. plov [in reality in Tajik, 'oshi palau': rice pilav dish with regional variation], khalat ['chapan': man's quilted coat], tebiuteka ['toqi,' I think: headwear, esp. man's squarish hat]).

Anyway, here is the best example of suzani that we have at home (unlike many of our friends, we haven't invested heavily in the embroidery market). We bought this pomegranate composition last June in Bukhara, and supposedly it was made by hand by a group of women who included the daughter of the man who owned the little shop, in one of the covered markets in the old city.





If you look closely, you can see that in fact this is actually done in a very different stitch than what I'm doing -- it's more of a chain stitch (zangjirak, I now know) than the flat, long stitch that predominates in the style I am learning. So I wonder whether that also enters into what is defined as suzani vs. gulduzi. I don't know, and of course my Tajik informants are not really all that into the finer points of categorization. I think I need to finally take my embroidery teacher up on her offer to go to the ethnography museum and explore with her their examples of embroidery to get more of the story.