Yi Women’s Blue Cotton Shirt with Slim Sleeves and Diagonal Placket Front

This Yi women’s shirt applies both applique and padded applique embroidery. By applique embroidery, the crafters would first cut cloth, gauze or twill into appliques featuring patterns they wanted, paste them onto the foundation weave, and then fix them with stitches along the edges of the patches. Palette and layers of applique embroidery can be flexible, either one layer of one single color or multiple layers of various colors. This is the way how the goat horn patterns were created on the sleeves of this garment, namely, by pasting cut-outs of black cotton cloth onto sleeves of red cloth and then chain stitching the edges with eye-catching yellow threads, resulting in a standing-out palette with red, black and yellow. As for the padded applique embroidery applied to the hemming of the two sleeves, it is a unique embroidery technique to people of ethnic minority groups. Fabrics in yellow, blue and white were cut into small triangles after being applied a layer of mixture made of water and flour and dried, and stitched onto the red cloth foundation alternatively, ending up with unique ethnic features accentuating by the contrast between the hem composed of triangles and the evenly-arranged lozenges on the red foundation.