Palestinian Tatreez

Hey, hi, hello, and welcome back to the We Were, We Are memorial quilt for Palestine. If you’re new here, welcome! The purpose of We Were, We Are is to honor the people of Palestine as well as their stories. I wanted to capture their stories beyond the headlines that made them famous.

As the Palestinian scholar Edward Said once observed in his book, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986), “Exile is a series of portraits without names, without contexts. Images that are largely unexplained, nameless, mute.” I had the idea to give names to the nameless, and write down the stories of the people. People that might end up being known only by the way they died, but not who they were. Today’s square is not about any particular person, but to commemorate the way that Palestinians have been telling their own stories for centuries.

Today’s square celebrates tatreez, the traditional Palestinian embroidery, a craft full of stories and history.

Palestinian Tatreez

Tatreez has been part of Palestinian life for centuries. As in the case of many other arts, especially fiber arts, women have used tatreez to tell their stories. Palestinian women and girls decorated their thobe (or dress) with their own interpretations of symbols meant to represent their history, memory, and place. Each region developed its own distinctive patterns and stitches, and the craft became a way for women to pass down stories, identity, and resilience through generations.

Each tatreez pattern tells a little tale: of womanhood, family, village, and resilience.

For more on the history of tatreez >>

Tatreez and We Were, We Are

For this quilt, I crocheted the base but cross-stitched the pattern in the traditional Palestinian way. Cross-stitching isn’t my usual craft, so forgive its scrappiness. However, as I poked each cross-stitch through the crochet fabric, I felt a connection to all the generations of hands that did this before me.

It was slow, simple, and joyful work, an act of honoring and remembering.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll see how each square, whether the flag, the watermelon, or now tatreez, tells a story of resilience, identity, and pride. This square is a quiet reminder that culture survives through care, craft, and hands keeping it alive.

This square is just one piece of a much larger story. You can see the whole quilt and the meaning behind it in my post We Were, We Are.