Today I introduce another style of Indian embroidery, from Kashmir! This piece is also from Dr. Shirazi’s personal collection.
Here is a closer view of one of the corners. The designs are amazingly intricate but use very simple stitches.
An even closer view:
Here is the smaller corner design, plus a view from the back:
I will continue with photos of the central motif another day! See you later 😉
This is one of a special series of posts based on the embroidery collection of Dr. Faegheh Shirazi, from The University of Texas at Austin. Her research is on “textiles, dress, gender identity discourse, and material culture in the Middle East; the meanings of veiling; rituals and rites of passage as they relate to material culture.” Over the years she has collected a number of examples of embroidery from around the world, and has very kindly allowed me to photograph them for my blog.
embroidery for ducks 
Do you know what the stitches are – back stitch, chain stitch…?
Isn’t it fascinating to compare the different colour sensibilities of different embroidery traditions from around the world!
I think this one is mostly back stitches, running stitch, and straight stitches. Maybe some stem stitch. My book indicates sometimes fly stitch, buttonhole stitch, and a few others are also used. But mostly simple stitches, which makes the final result more incredible.
About the colors – yeah I love it! I wrote a couple of posts a while ago about tertiary colors (I know you already read them cause you commented, http://enbrouderie.com/2011/03/21/brown-is-a-color/ and http://enbrouderie.com/2011/03/25/embroidered-color-wheel/). The slate blue and the orange are almost-complementary, which makes for a really interesting color scheme with the yellow for bright accents.
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Beautiful 🙂
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