Tradition · Questions
What fabric and thread are used for tatreez?
Ground cloths were traditionally hand-woven linen and cotton — named cloths include rumi and the striped majdalawi woven at al-Majdal — with imported even-weave itamine canvas used later as a counting grid. Embroidery thread was hand-spun and naturally dyed until roughly the 1930s, when imported silk and DMC cotton took over.
From the mid-nineteenth century to the 1940s, embroidery was worked on locally hand-woven, open-weave cloth, using yarn imported from Egypt, Syria and England alongside textiles produced locally at al-Majdal, Gaza, Nazareth, Bethlehem and Beit Jala. Rumi (رومي) names a locally woven linen or linen-blend ground. Majdalawi (مجدلاوي) is the striped cloth woven at al-Majdal, north of Gaza; the Victoria and Albert Museum's dress T.65-1913 is made of it, and its pointed irdan (أردان) sleeves are cut from the same fabric.
Colour came from natural dyes: indigo from a plant common in the Jordan Valley for deep blue, madder root and insect dyes for the characteristic reds.
Thread followed trade. Hand-spun, hand-dyed thread gave way from roughly the 1930s to imported silk floss and commercially produced DMC cotton, which had reached the Palestinian market in the 1920s. Imported cloth was more finely woven and harder to count on, so embroiderers began working over a superimposed even-weave canvas — itamine (إيتامين) — as a stitch-count guide.