Embroidery

I the small, quiet village Thorning you can find and visit Blicheregnen’s Museum. Together with my friend Mariann I went there today to see an embroidery exibition.

I don’t sew embroidery. Mariann does a little. I haven’t done any cross stitch since I was in my teens, and that lies many years back.. Never the less, the patterns and colors traditionally used by craftswomen of the Middel East (Syria, Palestine, Gaza) are fabulous, to say the least, and can easily provide inspiration to knitting patterns and weaving.
The exibition was partly dresses, coats, pillows and shawls from the Middle Eastern countries, but there was also embrodery (purses, mainly) from the Danish artist, Elisabeth Amdisen, who has created the exibition. She has also written a book about it – I bought that, and got it signed by the author, who just happend to be there today.. 🙂

Beautiful book, with lots of wonderful ideas!
The dresses with their richly patterned surfaces were fantastic. Here you see two of them:

All the patterns have their special meaning – it’s not just decoration. Many of the patterns were to protect from evil or accidents, a thing that we also know in Northern European (knitting)tradition.
Here is detail from af pillowcase:

The colors and geometric balance of this work is really captivating!
Now I’ll find the sofa and have a closer look at my new embroidery book.