Hualan Yao Women’s Black Handspun Cloth Blouse with Diagonal Placket and Slim Sleeves Front

Featured by arranging stitches based on the crossing points of the weft and warp threads, cross stitch embroidery is the most frequently used technique in needlework by women of a subgroup of the Yao people, the Hualan Yao, literally meaning Flower Basket Yao.
The lap and sleeves of this skirt is carpeted with exquisite embroidered geometric patterns in orange and reddish orange, signifying trees and flowers in Nature, among which cross-stitched white and light green motifs appear occasionally. In the yoke there is a squared-shaped decoration featuring towel gourd flowers, mainly composed of two light-colored patterns in helical symmetry, a complicated motif combination used by the Hualan Yao people. The two symmetric motifs, coupled with the so-called “garment back pattern”, namely, two lines of saw teeth patterns, form a rectangular-shaped decorative design, believed to be an evolvement of the seal of King Panwang, a mythological hero worshipped by the Yao people.
Due to the confinement of positions where the needle should be passing through the fabric, the crafters have little freedom in terms of layout and composition when applying cross stitch embroidery. That’s why most of the cross-stitched patterns are so simple and abstract. But the crafters tend to adopt various allocations of different stitches in order to add more dynamics to the image.