Red Dao Embroidery Workshop – One Day Experience in Ta Phin Village

The Red Dao people live in the mountainous region of northern Vietnam near Sa Pa.  They reside side-by-side with the Black Hmong, and live in a subsistence rice & corn growing culture. Embroidery is one of the special skills of the Red Dao. They acquire silk thread and cotton fabric from other local tribes and use these materials to make their traditional embroidered clothing. In this way the local minorities rely on one another. The silk is twisted. Depending on the size of the thread, it is later twisted again. Sometimes two or four threads are twisted together to make thread ready for embroidering. 

The embroidery is completed in lines, using the full length of the needle, and it is quite unique in that a design appears on both sides of the fabric. Embroidery skills are extremely important in ethnic minority life. A woman’s outfit includes a heavily embroidered tunic, apron, and pants, as well as embroidered accessories. A traditional outfit can take up to a year and a half to produce and the embroidery skills take many years to master. Traditional clothing is still worn daily by most Dao women. This means that women take their embroidery with them wherever they go, working on it whenever they have a free moment.No Red Dao women is seen as fit to marry or even desirable until she has sewn her own clothes.

Workshops:

Workshops use traditional cotton fabrics, silk threads and Dao needles.  The fabric is hand spund and hand woven and has a tight weave and small holes.  Needles are far smaller than most ethnic groups in Vietnam too meaning the work of the Dao is finer and more intricate.  It is this that sets their work apart and has earnt the Dao a repulation of being excuisite needleworkers. Good hand eye coordination is essential for our workshops, as is the need for patience and dexterity.  A days workshop will usual yeald an outcome that is small, testiment to the time taken to produce a full set of clothes.