#Jewish embroidery

[ace-hell]

Ok so i am late by like a month, i have been busy and STILL didn't finish my native jewish miku but fuck it here's indigenous, native israeli miku with a little of my touch and a small analysis:

The clothes:

The dress is double layered and based on biblical description i saw of the clothes ancient jews wore i added yellow hoops at the end of the dress to represent the color of our oppression- yellow belts under the muslim rule and yellow stars in the holocaust

The embroidery:

The Rikma(embroidery) is a personal project i am working on for the past 3 months. The embroidery that WAS practiced on the land eventually was allowed only to muslims and arabs, jews in ottoman syria/palestine were so oppressed and poor they didn't have access to threads and around 1800's some rabbis discoraged jews being involved in arab activity, not only that the jews has completely disconnected themselves from most of the arab culture after the spread of zionism to the land as a form of building their own identity. And if there were jews involved in embroidery it is unknown bc all the photos i see are labeled as "palestinian woman" with no explanation if it is a christian, muslim or jewish.

My project consists of making patterns and motifs based on jewish history, symbols, traditions, land etc and i try to make it original, unique and as diverse from the tatreez as possible to avoid conflict. If any of you want i can explain in a different analysis on what each pattern represents.

The jewelry:

I genuinely suck at drawing gold and jewelry and tried my best to adorn her with as much jewelry as i can. The side piece(that can barely be seen) is also a pattern i came up with, i call it "amulet"

(ps. I forgot to make her a normal necklace, wanted to make it with a hamsa)

Henna:

Henna is still practiced by jews, mainly sefardic and mizrahi jews + ashkenazi jews who grow up and participate in mizrahi culture. The henna on the hands is based on patterns i saw some jewish artists made (on google unfortunately it didn't have names) which has the star of david on it and on the legs i made a mix of bukharan and yemeni jewish henna.

So here it is. A native, indigenous jewish/judean/israeli(te) miku. I tried my best✨

[ilookattextile]

A passover towel from Germany c. 1903-4 and embroidered ribbons from Poland, 1915

From The Jewish Museum, NYC

[winteringart]

My fiber arts final! This is what I was working on instead of any of my normal illustration. It’s a Torah ark cover— a parochet— and it’s meant to commemorate the Simchat Torah Pogrom. The bit in the middle is a supernova, while the bits at the sides are meant to be either grain or challah, representing the kibbutzim. The Hebrew reads “We will dance again,” in reference to Mia Schem. All naturally dyed. Anyone clowning in the notes will be immediately blocked.

IMAGE ID: A series of photographs of a curtain hung in front of a wall. The curtain has a grey background and a number of appliqué pieces sewn on with embroidery floss. In the center is the image of a supernova and it’s framed by pillars of wheat like brown leaves on each side. On the top is a yellow crown, while on the bottom is the Hebrew: עוד נרקוד שוב. The Hebrew lettering is in pink and is attached with a pale yellow satin stitch. The first photograph is of the entire piece, while the other three are detail shots of the supernova, the wheat, and the crown. END ID.

[thejewitches]

Garlic embroidery hoop

[gayautisticjewishtexts]

[eraofstories]

I got this absolutely GORGEOUS book at the Getty a few weeks ago, and let me tell you, it is absolutely incredible! The illustrations include photographs of stunningly beautiful illuminated manuscripts, which were enough for me to buy it delightedly, but the writing is also really excellent; informative, engaging, with in depth references to a wide variety of things.

I've only read the first chapter and started the second, but there has already been a reference to Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, and the delightful discovery that an at first strange-seeming juxtaposition of a sage studying torah and a squirrel eating a nut is not so odd after all. It turns out that cracking a nut was a common medieval metaphor for the study of torah: "hard to crack, but rewardingly nutritious on the inside, the very food of life."

[shalom-iamcominghome]

Currently thinking about crafting (some of) my own judaica one day like.... just imagining being able to craft and then use, like, challot covers that I made for instance??? Wow..........

I one day want to start like... A jewish crafting club or something!!! Like, how cool would that be

[septembergold]

[covington-shenanigans]

...now I want to make a kippah with "women want me, fish fear me" on it in Hebrew

Tunic embroidered with old Norse runes around the bottom that read “I joined the SCA and all I got was this stupid t-tunic”

[ace-hell]

People loved my native judean miku so much i- 🥹 i didn't expect that

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

I want to try another verse(i warn you the style will be different bc i don't have a style yet lol)

[ilookattextile]

Challah cover research

Images from the Jewish Museum in Berlin

[darcylightninglewis]

source

Jewish woman’s wrap (izar) and face veil (khiliyye), Baghdad, Iraq, late 19th century

[winteringart]

My midterm for my fibers class! All naturally dyed, and the embroidery took forever. The prompt was more or less “do something with color,” so I thought I’d do the story of Noah with the rainbow.

IMAGE ID: Three photos of an art quilt showing a simple geometric boat on triangular waters, I. Front of a rainbow sky. The rainbow is made up of rectangles of different colors underneath circles of satin stitch embroidery in similar but different colors. The first photo shows the entire piece pinned up on the wall. The second one is a close up on the embroidery in the red part of the rainbow, while the third is a close up on the boat and the embroidery around it. END ID.

[mylight-png]

I frequently mourn the fact that so little is commonly known about the smaller details of traditional Jewish life. And I don't mean diaspora Jewish life, it's amazing how much we know and have preserved of various diaspora community traditions.

I mean ancient Judean lifestyles. And yes, the Torah outlines a lot of it, which is amazing. But I don't want to just know that Judean women wore jewelry or nose rings or etc, I want to be able to know what our traditional Jewish jewelry looked like. Smaller specifics instead of the broad strokes.

We can know what religious garb looked like, and even the general gist of day to day clothing. But I want to know specifically what colors people would dye their clothes for their personal tastes, the specific embroidery designs that were worn.

I want to know how traditional Judean women wore their hair, both how they wore their head coverings (knot styles, accessories for the coverings, etc) and how unmarried women would adorn their heads.

I want to know what traditional Judean makeup looked like, what toys the children played with, so so so many aspects of ancient Jewish life that I have been able to find nothing about.

Maybe, of course, I just don't know enough history. But I've tried googling these things and I have not ever found a satisfactory answer.

I wish to know what traditional, pre-occupation, pre-exile Jewish life was like.

If anyone knows anything about any of this, please please please reblog or send an ask or comment about anything you know.

This topic is of great interest to me but I'm not great at finding good history information, I've got more experience doing in-depth research on current events and politics.

[adiradirim]

From right to left: Beya Melamed; Bulgaria, 1890 - Jewish bride after the wedding; Turkey, early 20th century - Torah ark curtain made from a woman’s dress; Izmir, Turkey, 1929 - Wedding dress belonging to a Jewish family from Edirne, Turkey; early 20th century, gifted to museum exhibition in memory of Colombe Papo

Worn in the 19th and 20th century for weddings and other occasions by women across the Balkans and Anatolia, bindallı dresses were typically made of velvet in deep jewel tones. They were decorated with extensive gold embroidery of floral designs, which give this group of dresses their name, meaning thousand branches. This Ottoman-derived yet European-influenced style marked a transitional period between uses of traditional and modern western fashions.

The dresses - adopted from the surrounding culture as a fashionable item without any Jewish specificity - took on unique Jewish meaning through their use in the synagogue, where they became ark curtains, Torah mantles and binders, bimah covers, and the like, frequently with added dedicatory inscription. The donation of dresses and trousseau items by women to the synagogues created a personal bond between the women and the synagogue. The habit of donating these textiles to the synagogue endured long after the original embroidered bedclothes and dresses had gone out of fashion, and the transitional bindallı fashion thus remained alive in Sephardi synagogues long after the passing of the brides who wore the dresses.

[leroibobo]

when the homes in the depopulated palestinian village of lifta were originally built is impossible to tell and most likely varies from house to house. the area's been known since ancient times, including having been written about in the hebrew bible. it's retained multiple different names throughout history - lifta by romans, nephto by byzantines, clepsta by crusaders, then lifta again by arabs. in more recent times, the area saw battle in the early 19th century, when it saw a peasant's revolt against egyptian conscription and taxation policies. (egyptian-ottoman ruler muhammad ali had attempted to become independent from the ottoman empire, and sought to use the area of "greater syria" which palestine was apart of as a buffer state.)

the village was predominantly muslim with a mosque, a maqām for local sage shaykh badr, a few shops, a social club, two coffee houses, and an elementary school which opened in 1945. its economy was based in farming - being a village of jerusalem, farmers would sell their produce in the city's markets. an olive press which remains in the village gives evidence to one of the most important crops its residents farmed. the historically wealthy village was known for its intricate embroidery and sewing, particularly of thob ghabani bridal dresses, which attracted buyers from across the levant.

lifta also represents one of the few palestinian villages in which the structures weren't totally or mostly decimated during the 1948 nakba. 60 of the 450 original houses remain intact. from zochrot's entry on lifta:

israel's absentee property law of 1950 permits the state to expropriate land and assets left behind, and denies palestinians the right to return to old homes or to reclaim their property. it's estimated that there's around 400,000 descendants of the village's original refugee population dispersed in east jerusalem, the west bank, jordan, and the palestinian diaspora.

like many depopulated palestinian houses, some of those in lifta were initially used to settle predominantly mizrahi immigrants and refugees, in this case 300 jewish families from yemen and kurdistan. the houses weren't registered in their names, and the area generally saw poor infrastructure and no resources including water and electricity provided by the government. most left in the early 1970s as a part of a compensation program to move out people who'd been settled in depopulated palestinian houses - if they didn't, they were referred to as "squatters" and evicted. (holes were even drilled in the roofs of evacuated buildings to make them less habitable). the 13 families which remain there today only managed to do so because they lived close to the edge of the village.

in 1987, the israeli nature reserves authority planned to restore the "long-abandoned village" and turn it into a natural history center which would "stress the jewish roots of the site", but nothing came of it. several more government proposals on what to do with the land had been brought up since then. this culminated in in 2021 when the israel land administration announced without informing the jerusalem municipal authorities that it issued a tender for the construction of a luxury neighborhood on the village's ruins, consisting of 259 villas, a hotel, and a mall. since 2023, they've agreed to shelve and "rethink" these plans after widespread objection.

the reasons for the objections varied significantly between the opposing israeli politicians - who see the village as an exemplar of cultural heritage and "frozen in time" model of palestinian villages before 1948 - and palestinians - who largely see the village as a witness of the nakba and a symbol of hope for their return. lifta is currently listed by unesco as a potential world heritage site, a designation netanyahu has threatened to remove several times.

many palestinians who are descendent from its former residents still live nearby. like with many other depopulated palestinian villages, they've never ceased to visit, organize tours of the village, and advocate for its preservation.