RAGHAD'S EMBROIDERY

The bodice of a Palestinian style wedding dress

Raghad Hatahet was already an experienced and expert embroiderer at the age of seventeen. She loved the traditional embroidered dresses that were going out of fashion in the towns in Jordan and made many of them for herself. Her friends and colleagues at the office where she worked admired them and she began making them for her circle of aquaintances. The demand grew very quickly, at the same time as she started to realise how many women with little money had the leisure and the talent to work at embroidering at home.

Now  more than a hundred women work for her.  She provides the embroidery designs, cuts out the pieces to be done and later collects the finished pieces to be assembled professionally. For many of the dresses she makes, machine embroidery is also added.

The lovely medieval-type sweeping sleeves in the above examples are in the Palestinian style. The "coats" that frequently accompany the dresses are of a distinctive material; it is recycled camel hair made in Najaf in Iraq.

The dress on the right is the pride of her collection : it is a traditional wedding dress made in the style of Beit Dajar in Yafar (Jaffa) district in Palestine. You can see the bodice in greater detail at the head of the page. The girdle is also thickly embroidered. It can take more than six months to complete a dress like this one. The panels are made separately, often by different women, and the machine embroidery on the sleeves and between the hand embroidered panels is added before the dress is assembled. She might sell one or two of these dresses each year, at the price of 800JD.

Above you can see different views of this dress, together with a the back half of a similar black dress that has not yet been assembled. There is a beautiful embroidered panel at the bottom - see detail.

Besides the dresses, Raghad has almost every object it is possible to embroider, both large and small. From the thickly embroidered chairs and the standard lamp, to cushions, table runners and boxes, everything is there.

The embroidery stitch usually used is the traditional Palestinian cross stitch. Her women work at different speeds, and can be delayed by family crises or illnesses, which Raghad admits can be highly annoying for her schedule, however much she sympathises. They are paid according to the work they produce, and Raghad is inflexible as to the quality she demands. She supplies the pattern to be used, from a library she has collected by photocopying previous work  The photo on the right is a detail of an embroidered black scarf.

Here is a collection of small bags and sachets, useful for a hundred purposes. There is a separate collection of bags filled with lavender.

Notice the thick gold embroidery on the magnificent table runner on the right.

There are also a myriad small objects: book markers, coasters, head bands, boxes for jewellery and glasses/cups with embroidered lids.

Raghad's embroideries are not sold in many shops, except "Made in Jordan" in Petra. She exhibits in many trade shows, and handcraft fairs. Otherwise most of her sales are made through personal contacts. If you want to visit her house near to Safeway at Shmeisani in Amman, be sure to call her ahead of time; as you would expect she travels around Jordan a great deal. Like every high quality object made by hand, even the smaller objects are not cheap.  But you are sure to have something special when you buy from Raghad.

Her contact deails are : Raghad Hatahet, mobile phone number +962.79.516.4848 and her email address raghad.hatahet@gmail.com

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