Embroidery Costume as one Mainstay of Spiritual Life of Miao People
2 min readBest Miao dresses, for weddings. Brides take hours to put the dress on and not without the help of several ladies in village regarded with best luck.
Split Line Stitch is the Miao embroidery among the Miao embroideries .One normal dress usually takes four years of manual work. So it is the most expensive Miao dresses to buy on collectors market. As one way of expression of the totem on clothing, Miao embroidery occupies an important place in Miaos daily and cultural life and the making and wearing of the embroidery costume has a religious implication. So that is the reason the Miao people are happy to spend four to five years making one costume.
With this piety, the Miao people have been in search of excellence for embroidery skills and techniques. As a result, the Miao embroidery excels other embroideries in skills and technique, in contents and meanings. These characters make the old Miao embroidery beyond any possibility in today’s world for replicating Miao girls start to learn embroidery skills at the age of seven or eight, usually tutored by their mothers or in rare occasion female elder like grandmas or elder sisters. There are no official rituals for accepting a tutor and the tutoring and learning process is natural and embodied in a family’s daily life.
When the girls reach the age of fourteen or fifteen, their embroidery skills are mature and they will make embroideries all their life until they are too old to hold needles steadily and to seethe needle holes clearly.
