Artisan · Lụa và thêu tay · Quất Động village

Lê
Thị Hoa

Embroiderer · Fifth generation · At the frame since 1990

“Before ten the light is flat and the needle tells the truth.”

Her initials, stitched into the lower corner of every panel in a thread one shade off the ground.

Craft: Hand embroideryPanels, on hand-loomed silk
Workshop: Quất ĐộngThe frame in the window
Learned from: Her grandmotherwho embroidered altar cloths
Signature: Shading by stitchno dyed gradients
On LangSoul: 3 worksTakes commissions

01 — The maker

A season of mornings

Hoa works only before ten. After that the light hardens, she says, and the needle starts to lie about the colour.

Fingertips splitting a single silk thread into finer strands, in a Quất Động embroidery room, a wooden frame set in the window, mulberry silk, deep wine red and ochre, soft morning light

An embroidery frame with silk stretched taut, needle resting in it, in a Quất Động embroidery room, a wooden frame set in the window, mulberry silk, deep wine red and ochre, soft morning light

Hoa works only before ten. After that the light hardens, she says, and the needle starts to lie about the colour.

She learned on altar cloths at her grandmother’s frame, in the years when the village still made for temples, and she keeps the discipline of that work: thread split into six, stitches laid so close the ground disappears, colour blended by laying shades side by side rather than by dyeing.

A panel the size of a window takes her a season — November to March, the dry months, four hours a morning. She will not take two at once. The lotus pond on LangSoul was begun in the week of Tết and finished when the first rains came.

Macro of stitches shading from deep pink to cream in a lotus petal, in a Quất Động embroidery room, a wooden frame set in the window, mulberry silk, deep wine red and ochre, soft morning light

An embroidery frame set against a window, morning light, the embroiderer's hand blurred, in a Quất Động embroidery room, a wooden frame set in the window, mulberry silk, deep wine red and ochre, soft morning light

02 — The works

Three works from the bench

All silk & hand embroidery works

Lotus pond, hand-embroidered silk

Panel · Unique

$860

Cushion cover, embroidered cranes

Cushion cover · Edition of 8

$320

Small embroidered panel, kingfisher

Panel · Unique

$520

All silk & hand embroidery works

03 — Commission

Hoa takes one commission a season

A panel to a wall, a scene from a photograph of the room, a colour already in the house. Tell us what you have in mind and we will carry the conversation to the window. One season — four months — from thread to crate.

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A letter from Quất Động

“We sent a photograph of the wall and the afternoon light. A season later a panel arrived that seemed to have been stitched from that photograph.”

— A. & M. Lindqvist, Copenhagen, on their commission from Hoa.

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