The stitching circle in Bethlehem where women keep a grid alive

Every week in a Bethlehem cafe, Samar Abdrabbou sets out thread and counted-grid linen for women who come to stitch and to talk. The circle she calls SAMARKAND has been running since 2024. Two thousand miles away, in Dundee and Antwerp, the same stitch is hanging on museum walls.

"The sense of community while stitching with others is so powerful," she says. "Women feel supported, sharing stories."

Tatreez was never decorative filler. A village dress was legible at a glance: Bethlehem thobes carried couched cord in gold and silver-wrapped silk, a technique the town's workshops also used on priests' vestments; Ramallah favoured red silk on white linen; Gaza-area dresses ran dark indigo or black under dense, fine stitching. The motifs were named after what women saw — cypress tree, moon, orange blossom, the pasha's tent.

Politics reached the thread before it reached the pattern. Until the 1930s, embroiderers bought silk floss carried from Damascus and Aleppo; after 1948 those routes collapsed with the people who used them, and the women turned to mercerised cotton sold by the French firm DMC, whose pattern booklets quietly slipped European motifs into Palestinian dresses, where they were given Arabic names and kept. From the 1960s, women's societies in the camps and West Bank towns bought thread in bulk and paid for finished panels, turning a trousseau skill into income.

That history is what the curator Rachel Dedman has spent a decade following at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her work is now on show twice over: Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine at V&A Dundee, and Embroidering Palestine at MoMu in Antwerp. Most of the historic dresses in such shows come from private hands — collections assembled in Amman, Ramallah and the diaspora, many of the garments bought from families who sold them in hard years.

The Antwerp show also carries something new. London-based designer Ayham Hassan built a collection, IM-Mortal Magenta: The Color That Doesn't Exist, out of tatreez patterns and Gaza. Ola Muhanna, a textile student from Deir Al-Ghusun in the north, documents the same current as it moves through contemporary fashion; a post of hers in late August, showing a daisy-chain motif running across a dress, was watched close to two million times.

The grids are online now — digitised village charts, video tutorials, archives that let a learner in another country work from a pattern her grandmother would simply have known by heart. The practitioners describe what they are doing plainly: holding ground against erasure, one counted cross at a time.