When Lina Barkawi first set out to make her own thobe, a traditional Palestinian dress, she never anticipated that it would become a two-year labor of love. But as Barkawi painstakingly sewed and stitched her dress, she realized that it was more than just a garment. It was a representation of her heritage, a dying art form, and her own role in preserving it.
Barkawi’s thobe is a pale gray color with vibrant embroidery in orange, green, red, and light blue adorning the front bodice, sleeves, and hem. This traditional Palestinian embroidery, known as tatreez, was not only a way for Barkawi to connect with her heritage, but also a means of expressing her personal identity and story. However, learning the art of tatreez was not as simple as watching YouTube tutorials or joining online forums, the typical methods of learning a craft or art form.
Palestinian embroidery is an ancient tradition that has been passed down orally from one generation to the next, usually from mother to daughter or grandmother to granddaughter. However, due to the displacement of Palestinians by Israeli militia and settlers, the survival of this art form has become increasingly precarious. Many Palestinians, like Barkawi, have lost access to their traditional embroidery and are now turning to digital resources and communal spaces to reclaim and digitize this art form.
Barkawi explains, “I was super frustrated with the idea that there were not that many resources available to construct my own dress from scratch… I found that to be really upsetting because it’s something so core to our tradition, but it’s not really something that anyone knows about—I didn’t know about it, my family doesn’t really practice it on my Palestinian side.”
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One of the main challenges faced by novice stitchers like Barkawi is the lack of high-resolution patterns that show embroidery motifs clearly for replication. Barkawi initially purchased expensive pattern books, but quickly realized that digitized versions would be more accessible and user-friendly. This is where Tirazain, a website dedicated to digitizing and cataloging tatreez motifs, became an invaluable tool for Barkawi’s embroidery journey.
Tirazain features over 1,000 digitized tatreez motifs organized by theme, geographic origin, and color count. The motifs are displayed on a black background, giving them an almost pixelated appearance reminiscent of eight-bit graphics. Users can browse through various categories, such as nature, and find patterns for palm trees, the moon, and spiderwebs. When a user selects a pattern, they can download PDFs or other file types with each individual stitch plotted out on a graph. Many of these patterns come from existing pattern books that may be difficult for the community to obtain.
The work of digitizing these motifs stitch by stitch was undertaken by embroidery artist Zain Masri and a group of volunteers. Masri, who works in marketing at Google, became interested in embroidery during the pandemic and noticed a recurring challenge in finding complete and clear embroidery patterns online. This led her to create Tirazain as a centralized platform for sharing embroidery motifs and patterns.
Masri explains, “Some would share, let’s say, a low-res blurry picture of a cushion or a dress, and they’d say, ‘I’m trying to recreate this pattern, but I can’t find it…’ Sometimes people would find bits and pieces, [or] a subset of the motif, but not the full design, and this was a recurring challenge.”
Tirazain not only aims to make tatreez more accessible but also seeks to preserve its existence. In 2021, Palestinian embroidery was included in UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, a designation meant to bring attention to endangered cultural practices. Masri has self-funded Tirazain as a way to contribute to preserving and promoting this important aspect of Palestinian culture.
Artists like Masri and Wafa Ghnaim, a dress historian, teacher, and author, are working to protect and share the ancestral knowledge of tatreez embroidery. Ghnaim, who is also a former student of Barkawi, has spent years teaching workshops and classes to Palestinians across North America. Through her teaching and research, Ghnaim aims to recover and fortify the lost lineages of embroidery that have been compromised or broken by displacement and war.
Ghnaim emphasizes the importance of virtual spaces in facilitating the communal practice of embroidery, especially for Palestinians who have been deprived of physical access to their traditional garments. She states, “Our dresses are exiled just like we are… What we really need to be digitizing are all the millions of patterns on these dresses that are under lock and key in these museums that we will never be able to reclaim physically.”
The art of tatreez embroidery is vast and goes beyond what is currently available online and in print. Ghnaim points out that many patterns online focus on cross-stitch, but there are many other traditional stitch types that are used. She encourages the new generation of embroiderers to redevelop the skills of their ancestors, such as being able to recreate a pattern simply by looking at an existing dress.
Tatreez is not just an art form; it is a language through which artists can express themselves. Barkawi, for example, incorporated various symbols and motifs into her wedding thobe to represent her heritage, identity, and story. And with projects like Tirazain and the work of artists like Masri and Ghnaim, the tradition of tatreez embroidery has a chance to be preserved for future generations of Palestinians to connect with their heritage and express their own narratives.
