A small enigma

In the same tiny seaside village of round huts where we found the baby mobile, we found this. I am still not absolutely certain, but I believe it to be a hindhoni - a cushion worn on the head for carrying objects around. However, I could be quite mistaken. There is a paradox in what we were told by our guide and the research that I have been able to do after our trip. We were told that this object and another similar to it were children's bracelets. I loved that explanation :) This piece is certainly small enough to be a decoration for a child, it will not even pretend to go over my hand. At the same time, in all the books and pictures that I have looked through, and in all the pictures that my husband and I took - nowhere are there Rabari children wearing bracelets of this kind. There are many instances of Rabari girls and also Harijan children wearing bangles and either silver or gold bracelets, but nothing so brightly beaded!

It is possible that this is actually from another tribe or from the mainstream Gujarati community rather than being Rabari, despite the fact that we bought it in a Rabari village. Unfortunately, I don't know enough to be able to say with certainty! At the moment my opinion remains that this is a ceremonial carry ring for use with the copper pots that women carry on their heads when welcoming guests to the village. Or perhaps for resting a pot on a table or the ground?
The construction of this beaded ring began with the beads being threaded on a string which was then oversewn through the red fabric and into the stuffing. Inside the red fabric (as you can see in the top picture where I was so curious that I had to open up part of it...) was a roll of plain fabric. It is rolled so tightly that it is extremely hard and made the object much heavier than one expects. The inside roll is sewn together to meet in a circle and then the red fabric is whip stitched in place to cover it.
The tassels are made with 3 baby cowrie shells and cotton threads of many different colors. The circumference is: 3.5 inches across to the outsides.
The thickness is: .75 inches

Yao Women's Pants

We visited a small Iu Mien Yao village in Thailand on the road from Doi Tung to Doi Mae Salong. The ladies that we met were delightful, including an elderly grannie who is probably the toughest person that I have ever met. As we purchased the trousers from her there was a long period of negotiation and bargaining in which she produced the most incredible scowls when we offered too low a price. Once the price was settled upon she came back to her normal smiling self and there were no hard feelings, it was all part of the 'game' of the bargain. I will do another post on her entire costume at a later date. She is the one that embroidered the trousers above and informed us during the bargaining process that it took her 6 months to finish them.

Yao costume varies quite a bit depending on sub-branches, groups and 'nationality' but the beautifully embroidered pants are common to almost all Yao. "All Yao Mien and Mun women wear trousers except for one Mien sub-branch, the Yao Tien from Northern Vietnam, and one Mun sub group in Hainan, China."pg. 102 of ' The Yao Mien and Mun of ...' by Jess G. Pourrett

The loose trousers remind me a bit of the way that some Middle Eastern pants are constructed with the large triangular crotch piece. The cloth is indigo-dyed cotton and the embroidery threads are also cotton. The leg panels are embroidered first, then sewn to the rest of the pants with a loose running stitch. Typical of Thai Iu Mien Yao trousers this pair has the mandatory weave stitch pattern at the bottom of the legs and then three large panels of designs going up almost to the waist.

Here you can see the stitching on the inside seams.

Amazingly the embroidery is done from the back of the fabric, a common theme in South Asian tribal embroidery. The bottoms of the legs are embroidered first in the extremely important bands of symbols that are employed in every pair of Yao trousers, anywhere from 2 to 5 rows, using weave stitch.

A close-up of the three bands of weave stitching. Originally the weave stitches would have been done in silk thread but lately cotton thread is much more widely used. Following the Iu Mien Yoa tradition, grid stitch has been used for the smaller bands of symbols within these rows.

The inside of the weave-stitch bands, also showing the hemmed cuff.

A close-up view of some of the designs of the next two rows of large colorful embroidery done with grid stitch.

The transition between the 2nd and 3rd bands of embroidery with a smaller geometric design between.


Embroidery at the very tops of the thighs. You can see the different tones of the indigo dye in the very top where the waist band has been sewn to the leg panel.

Final picture of the back side of a stitched panel where it has been sewn to the crotch fabric.

Harijan bag

This beautiful bag caught my eye as an old harijan woman displayed it in her wares under a huge shady tree in the middle of her dusty village. The stitches are very fine, but the two sides of the bag appear to have been embroidered by two different people. The peacock's body and tail are different as are the shapes of the smaller birds (parrots?). On one side the stitching hides almost all of the drawings but drawings on the other side are easily seen all over the place. The thing that is most interesting is the words. It is Gujarati. One side has nearly perfect textbook letters while the other has squiggly and hard to read letters, as though the embroiderer didn't truly understand what they were stitching.

The well-formed Gujarati letters shown above and the rough ones are below.

The entire bag is handstitched and has a lining that the embroidery is stitched through so that the back of the stitching can be seen on the inside of the bag. The triangles were sewn with the seams and then a very loose running stitch was used to stitch the outsides of the seams. A zipper is hand sewn in the top and a garish, modern machine-made band was used for the strap, again handsewn to the bag.

A shot of the interior of the bag with the stitching through the lining fabric.

A very fine chain stitch is the main embroidery stitch used to create and decorate the motifs. All the motifs are then outlined with backstitch in white. The Gujarati text is also stitched with chain stitch. The mirrors are worked with cretan stitch.Here is a horrible picture of the lady who sold the bag with the bag lying in front. I apologize for the quality of the picture, this was a few years ago with a not-nice camera and a very bad photographer (me).

Baby Toy

In a tiny Rabari village of round houses on the coast of Gujarat we purchased this baby toy. It is perhaps supposed to be a parrot, though that is just a guess based on other triangular type motifs that are labeled as parrots in some of my research books. Typical of Rabari "stuffed" objects, it is very stout and heavy. The stuffing is tightly rolled fabric sewn into the desired shape then covered with the decorative outer layer. We were informed by our guide, and the gestures of the Rabari woman who sold it to us, that it was a baby toy similar to a mobile.

The stitches:

The yellow lines are Chain Stitch.

The white squares are Back Stitch.

Yellow and orange square and rectangles are in Satin Stitch.

The mirrors are held on with an incredibly tight Cretan stitch and surrounded by white Running stitches. Two of the mirror on the top of the triangle have cut through the stitches on one or both sides.

The white zigzag holds the triangle together down both sides and tiny tassles of orange and yellow have been sewn to all three corners.