Beautiful resilience
Tatreez is so much more than embroidery-it's a living archive of memory and resistance. The idea of stitching your story because you can't go home hits hard. How do we support these artisans without turning their pain into a commodity?
How some in Palestinian diaspora find connection, identity and resilience in traditional embroidery
Decades later, Samar Kabouli still fondly recalls gathering with women in her family and sipping cardamom-spiced coffee as they embroidered fabric with colorful threads in traditional Palestinian patterns. Born in Lebanon to Palestinian refugees, Kabouli had never seen her parents’ homeland. But more than just making pretty designs, the threads in her needle were stitching a connection to her heritage. It’s known as “tatreez,” and Kabouli, 48, started doing the traditional form of Palestinian embroidery in her teens to make money.