Lụa và thêu tay · Silk & hand embroidery · Unique
Lotus pond, hand-embroidered silk
Thêu tay — hand embroidery; here the colour is blended by laying stitches of different shades side by side, never by dyeing the thread.
Lê Thị Hoa
Hoa works only before ten, when the light is flat and the needle tells the truth about colour. This panel took her a season — the week of Tết to the first rains — four hours a morning, on silk loomed by hand in the next village.
The thread is split into six before it is threaded. There are no dyed gradients; the water and the petals are shaded by laying stitches of neighbouring colours side by side until the eye blends them. From across a room it is a pond. From a hand’s width it is a decision made a hundred thousand times.
- Materials
- Silk thread on hand-loomed Vạn Phúc silk, linen backing
- Technique
- Hand embroidery, split thread, shading by stitch
- Dimensions
- 62 × 46 cm · 24.4 × 18.1 in · 0.4 kg, unframed
- Edition
- Unique work · Signed and sealed on the reverse
- Made
- Quất Động, Thường Tín · 2026
The making
A season of mornings, in four movements
Embroidery of this fineness cannot be done in the afternoon, and cannot be hurried in the morning. The calendar is set by the light.
I
The ground
Hand-loomed Vạn Phúc silk, stretched on the frame and left a week to settle.
II
The drawing
The pond traced in a single thread, the colours decided against the silk in morning light.
III
The stitching
Thread split into six; stitches laid so close the ground disappears; colour blended by neighbouring shades.
IV
The last morning
The initials stitched in the corner in a thread one shade off the ground; the panel left on the frame a week more.
From the same village
