Blog #3 - ‘Learning Textile Art in Samarkand’

In the photo: my dad and my mom(1973, Samarkand, Uzbekistan)

In the photo: me at home (1983, Samarkand, Uzbekistan)

My father was an engineer, and my mother was a teacher. My father taught me how to make boats from wooden sticks, twigs, and boards, and my mother taught me how to cook deliciously and bake fresh scrumptious pastries. From early childhood onward, I also wanted to create things from fabric scraps and threads. So when I had a chance to visit my neighbors’ girls, I would run to them to “play”. At that time, girls had no free time to play. They had different tasks, for example, sweeping the yard, embroidering a ribbon for braids or pants with cross-stitch, and embroidering a tubeteika with cross-stitch. Sometimes mothers or grandmothers gave their girls the remnants of silk fabric from dresses to crochet for handkerchiefs. How much I enjoyed learning a new craft with them! In this way, I learned how to crochet and how to cross-stitch national ornaments.

It was all so natural. You would sit on a Kurpacha, a soft mattress sewn and stuffed with cotton, next to an elderly woman and watch how she shows the technique and teaches. Magic happened under her leisurely fingers – multi-colored embroidery was born, like the kind she prepared for her granddaughter's wedding, which she showed me, saying: "This is a pomegranate fruit. Look, I embroidered seeds. So many of my great-grandchildren will be born, and our family will not dry out." And once before, she had sat next to her grandmother, and studied from her. All these patterns, which had been patiently drawn with a needle and a crochet hook on a homespun cloth, fell into my soul like a precious seed, that, later would suddenly sprout under my fingers.