Palestinian embroidery, or tatreez, is a centuries-old traditional art form historically used to adorn a woman’s dress (thobe). The transmission of cultural and technical knowledge, stitching methods, and symbolism was passed through storytelling, as well as by closely observing each embroidery motif’s application, placement, and treatment. The Arabic term tatreez is defined more broadly as the ornamentation of cloth; however, contemporarily it is most often associated with Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery that can be outlined on graph paper and transmitted through a paper pattern. Despite the contemporary association of tatreez to cross-stitch alone, Palestinian embroidery practices have long incorporated an expansive range of stitches, techniques, and designs, each imbued with social meaning and shaped by historical and regional transformations throughout the centuries. Palestinian women and girls meticulously adorned the thobe with tatreez patterns that inscribed history, memory, and place, with each stitch reflecting the maker’s life and her connection to the land through fashion.

Today, the urgency of cultural heritage preservation for Palestinians has led to a growing emphasis on documenting embroidery motifs using graph paper and digital programs. These approaches now serve as a substrate for preserving what was once a tradition carried through observation, practice, and storytelling. While this shift has helped protect motifs for future generations, it has also constrained the expressive range of the tradition, flattening the variation and adaptation of motifs once shaped by the maker into motifs with defined meanings and in rigid forms; limiting the subtle choices, or miscalculations, she made that told her story. The shift in the mode of transmission—from oral to diagrammatic, and from fabric to paper—has increasingly framed Palestinian embroidery as a practice rooted in the past, rather than as a living, contemporary tradition that reflects the life of the embroiderer.

I was only two years old when I began learning tatreez from my mother, Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim. As a child, my sisters and I were asked to study motifs carefully before attempting to stitch them. My mother emphasized the importance of “close looking,” or careful visual observation: a method of sustained, attentive, critical observation used to interpret material objects, focusing on their formal and contextual details. We would begin by analyzing the stitch count, then redraw the motif onto graph paper. After that, we were taught to be thoughtful and intentional about how to incorporate color in ways that reflected our own stories. It was through this stage of interpretation that the motif transformed into a storytelling tool, holding continuity with the pattern while opening space for personal meaning. I still have the pattern I drew for the Cleopatra motif when I was thirteen, sketched in blue marker. When I stitched it, I chose purple variegated and gold threads to reflect my understanding of Cleopatra’s femininity, power, and beauty. The process was not simply technical. It was an act of translation between what I inherited and what I imagined. In this sense, tatreez was not static or to simply be copied. It was an interpretive practice grounded in my memory, shaped by my observation, and transformed in real time by my hands.

I vividly recall the experience of embroidering the Cleopatra design. I attempted to stitch the lotus flower borders that framed the central panel by memory. In my initial drawing, I intentionally omitted the repetition of the lotus motifs to challenge myself and test whether I could reproduce what my mother had mastered. After hours of embroidery, I took a look at my work overall and the flowers seemed visually unbalanced. Unsettled, I called my mother from the kitchen where she was preparing dinner, and asked her to assess my work. She counted the stitches while standing in front of me and as the food cooked in the kitchen. With a restrained look of concern, she remarked: “Wafa, the lotus flowers on the right side are one stitch too small. It will always bother you if you don’t fix it. You should take these stitches out.” I pleaded with her, suggesting alternatives that I do not recall today. But we both came to the same conclusion, the stitches must be taken out, one way or another.

Disheartened, I spent the remainder of the week removing the stitches, each thread pulled out with a growing sense of frustration and disappointment. I still remember the distinct sound of the threads pulling out of the fabric. My own doing. Although I began restitching, I ultimately left the project unfinished until 2015. For two decades, I avoided restitching those flowers, preserving the fabric along with the original threads and needle, wrapped together and stored. I eventually completed the panel in time for the publication of my first book, Tatreez & Tea: Embroidery and Storytelling in the Palestinian Diaspora. Only now, years later, do I see why the mistake needed to be removed: the opposite side of the panel held a mirrored version of the same motifs, symmetrically framing the composition. The lesson was in the Arabic word al-takamul, translated as “perfection”—not in the sense of flawlessness or technical precision, but as something perfectly whole, harmonious, and integrated. My mother was teaching us that “close looking” was not enough; variations could remain as long as the compositional balance stayed intact. It was a lesson in honoring historic modes of practice, passed down through generations of Palestinian women, where preservation meant more than replicating motifs and was rooted in understanding how something was made and composed.

This dynamic capacity for reinterpretation in Palestinian embroidery practices is rooted in a long-standing tradition of variation and adaptation, one that I was learning to navigate as a young embroiderer attempting the complex Cleopatra design. The story of Cleopatra contains a series of symbolic references, interpreted on a motif-by-motif basis. The largest floral design in the lower half was told to me by my mother and grandmother to represent Cleopatra’s ring. In her final days, Cleopatra is believed to have used a poison, possibly the venom of an asp hidden in a ring, to end her life after the Roman invasion and the fall of her kingdom. The same eight-petaled rosette, however, is often interpreted as a zahra (flower) in Palestinian embroidery and is a motif with deep historical resonance across West Asia. In ancient Mesopotamia, the rosette appeared in a variety of objects including anthropomorphic representations, for example, on a Canaanite seated goddess bearing a rosette on her headdress in the fourteenth to thirteenth century BCE. During the early twentieth century, the same flower was referred to as a “moon” in Ramallah, not a flower. During the First Intifada (1987–1993), this motif evolved once more to become “The Intifada Rose,” replacing the poison of the asp at the center of Cleopatra’s ring with the image of prison bars—an embroidered expression that documents the widespread use of detention, political imprisonment, and abuse by the Israeli occupation. These transformations underscore the motif’s capacity to absorb and convey layered meanings across time, shifting from associations with divine protection to expressions of nationalist resistance.

The use of paper to distribute embroidery patterns in Palestine, beginning in the 1940s, introduced a new era of motifs that increasingly obscured the regional distinctions once embedded in the embroidery traditions of each village, city, and tribe. Prior to the widespread use of pattern books, women and girls primarily learned motifs by copying them from other embroidered garments. Both local and foreign motifs exhibited variation, not only from one thobe to another, but sometimes within a single dress, whether cross-stitched, half-stitched, or rendered using other techniques. For instance, the same bird motif found on a single thobe may appear in varied colors, stitch counts, and degrees of completion.

In addition to locally produced pattern books, foreign pattern books—filled with curvilinear floral designs and of animals not native to the region—began circulating widely across Palestine. For instance, the French company DMC, which imported both pattern books and affordable, popular pearl cotton threads to Palestine beginning in the 1930s, circulated patterns that shared Eastern European designs. Following the war of 1948 and the mass expulsion of Palestinians to make way for the creation of Israel, untraditional patterns became so prevalent that they are frequently seen in the dresses produced after this period. However, curvilinear and foreign animal motifs had appeared in Palestinian dressmaking prior to this time, as documented by anthropological archaeologists Grace Crowfoot and Phyllis Sutton in their March 1935 article entitled “Ramallah Embroidery.” In this study, they describe a dress from 1900 made by a local Ramallah woman, which featured a swan and lyre—both not native to Palestine. Ramallah women who were interviewed, including the owner of the dress, identified the swan and pond in various ways: the swan was interpreted as both a duck or a goose, and the lyre was described either without a name or as a pond or pool. The example of the swan in a pond reflects the culture of continuous reinterpretation within tatreez practices, as well as the inclusion of foreign motifs prior to the widespread distribution of pattern books in Palestine.

The continued use of pattern books today has created a vital, if reductive framework for interpreting the symbolism of tatreez among Palestinians in exile. In the art form’s contemporary revival, Palestinians often rely on pattern books to locate motifs associated with their ancestral villages in an effort to recreate the embroideries of their elders and assert their cultural identities. While it is true that certain embroidery patterns can be associated with specific villages or cities—for instance, the tall palm motif of Ramallah—some motifs were shared by multiple villages, others were common across the eastern Mediterranean, and some communities did not engage in cross-stitch embroidery at all. Certain areas practiced alternative techniques, such as couching stitch in Bethlehem, while others, like the Galilee, employed distinctive forms of appliqué. Others did not stitch on their dresses much or at all, and instead used bold fabric colors, such as those seen in Nablus. Pattern books have overemphasized cross-stitch as the primary vehicle for expressing Palestinian cultural identity in dress, resulting in a form of unintentional cultural dispossession for Palestinians in exile whose elders did not participate in the tradition of cross-stitch embroidery in the early twentieth century, but represented their identities in dress in other creative and remarkable ways.

In addition, pattern books have established a more rigid approach to executing motifs, leaving little room for variation. Birds, for example, are now often stitched in repetition, using the same colors, stitch counts, and compositional structure. This pursuit of technical perfection sometimes feels like a masking of personal expression, as if to withhold from the viewer insight into their daily struggles, moments of error, or improvisational choices. I contend that the emphasis on flawlessness rather than al-takamul, reinforced through the linear grids of pattern books, has introduced a sense of emotional and intellectual distance between modern iterations of traditional dress and the embodied practice of close looking. As a researcher, I often find that these repetitive, standardized designs erect a barrier in my own historical documentation of contemporary handmade Palestinian dresses, as they obscure the personality and decision-making authority of the embroiderer. Instead of encountering a garment that invites inquiry into the maker’s logic, creativity, and intention, I am met with a formal uniformity that feels cold and uninviting.

One example of this shift in practice, as noted earlier, is the use of color. In contemporary pattern books, color is rigidly assigned to each unit of a motif and is followed precisely. However, in my own close looking at historic dresses over the past ten years, I have observed a different logic at play. Palestinian women in the nineteenth century often stitched with a single color for as long as the thread lasted—typically an arm’s length—regardless of the section of the motif they were working on. When the thread ran out, they selected another color, based on availability or personal inclination in the moment. A bird might be stitched, legs and all, in blue; when the blue thread was exhausted, the top half of the bird might be completed in pink. There might be a single green stitch within the same motif, inserted for no apparent reason. The next bird, even within the same row, would look entirely different. The motif remained legible, but its color composition became a signature of the maker at a particular moment in time. In contrast, contemporary handmade dresses now often reproduce the same color palette for each motif. In these dresses, I lose sight of the maker and her story.

The Palestinian dressmaker’s transition from using oral to written transmission, and from copying embroidery on fabric to reading paper patterns, has contributed to a framing of tatreez as a practice rooted in the distant past rather than as a living, contemporary tradition. In this process, key aspects of the indigenous methodology have been diminished, particularly the role of memory, improvisation, and variation that are inherently expressive and unique to each embroiderer. This reliance on paper as a transmission tool echoes earlier colonial ethnographic practices in the region, where anthropologists used written and diagrammatic methods to fix and categorize indigenous knowledge as a form of study—methods that have since been internalized in Palestinian heritage preservation efforts. These shifts invite a critical reexamination of how documentation practices, particularly those shaped through colonial modes of documentation, can both protect and alter cultural heritage. As I learned when I stitched The Story of Cleopatra as a young teenager, it is essential to understand tatreez as something vital and mutable, rather than as an antiquated art form. I look forward to a new chapter of contemporary tatreez practice, where we restore value to the improvisation, variation, and broad scope of storytelling that once defined it. It is within the irregularities of composition, unexpected stitches, and color changes, that the story of the maker is most vividly told. In honoring the integrity of an embroiderer’s choices and in using paper as an interpretive rather than instructive tool, we are reclaiming the epistemologies carried in women’s hands and ensuring tatreez remains a living tradition. It is through this reclamation that the future of tatreez remains not only possible, but self-determined.

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NOTES

1. Wafa Ghnaim, Tatreez & Tea: Embroidery and Storytelling in the Palestinian Diaspora (Brooklyn: The Tatreez Institute, 2016).

2. Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 1–19.

3. Ghnaim, Tatreez & Tea, 351.

4. Ibid.

5. The Society of Inaash Association, Traditional Palestinian Clothing (Al Bireh: The Society of Inaash Association, 1982), 220, 254.

6. Palestinian Culture Center Amman, “Explore handmade embroidery, ceramics, traditional foods, and books—each piece reflects the rich culture of Palestine and supports women …” Instagram, August 10, 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/C-fZ5U0tv_9/ (accessed June 15, 2025).

7. Widad Kamel Kawar, Threads of Identity: Preserving Palestinian Costume and Heritage (Cyprus: Rimal Books, 2011), 217.

8. Hanan Karaman Munayyer, Traditional Palestinian Costume: Origins and Evolution (Northampton: Olive Branch Press, 2011), 45 & 47.

9. For more on the rise of printing presses in Palestine, see: Mohammed Basil Suleiman, “Early Printing Presses in Palestine: A Historical Note,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 36 (Winter 2009): https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/jq-articles/JQ_36_Early_Printing_0.pdf.

10. Grace M. Crowfoot and Phyllis M. Sutton, “Ramallah Embroidery: Introduction to the Study of Palestinian Embroidery,” Embroidery: The Journal of the Embroiderers’ Guild 3, no. 2 (March 1935): 26; Kawar, Threads of Identity, 233.

11. Munayyer, Traditional Palestinian Costume, 46.

12. Munayyer, Traditional Palestinian Costume, 45.

13. Crowfoot and Sutton, “Ramallah Embroidery,” 33; Munayyer, Traditional Palestinian Costume, 45.

14. To begin to explore the wide body of scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial practices in the region, see: Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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