How do tatreez patterns differ by region?

The caveat comes first because it is load-bearing. The Victoria and Albert Museum attributes dress T.65-1913 to the Gaza region on the strength of its majdalawi cloth, whose weaving town is known, and describes the embroidery only as broadly in keeping with Gaza-style dresses of the period — the museum's own wording is a judgement, not a certainty. Palquest documents women observing and copying unfamiliar patterns from other villages on market days and holidays, and describes the post-1948 style as undeniably Palestinian but from no identifiable region. There was never a reliable one-to-one map from a motif to a village.

Within those limits, the sourced tendencies run as follows. Bethlehem is documented for tahriri couching in gold, silver or silk cord on dresses and velvet jackets, and for the ceremonial malak. A Ramallah-region jillayeh in the British Museum is indigo-dyed handwoven linen worked in dominant orange-red silk cross-stitch with green, pink and mauve detail. In the Galilee cross-stitch was comparatively less used and patchwork preferred, while dresses from the al-Tira area show floral and foliage designs in red and blue thread on white cotton. Dresses from the Nablus and Tulkarm areas were generally without embroidery, using coloured woven stripes instead — and Palquest states plainly that the reasons for that deviation are unclear.