Applique Illustrations

Sorry, I don't know the name of the artist who created this particular tentmaker applique. It's another example of an image formed using arabic letters, although this one looks a bit more like it's cheating to me.

To answer some questions and comments about yesterday's post. I have actually watched an older man sitting cross-legged on the floor doing needle-turn applique at quite a rapid clip. Much faster than I work. The applique is traditionally done by men, passed down from father to son in particular.

One time I was down at Tentmaker Street I saw a pretty young blonde woman sitting side by side with one of the men as they both worked on an applique. I so wanted to stop and ask questions, but didn't want to be rude.

Remember a while back I showed you the inside of Fattoh and Sons applique shop? Well, they did the illustrations for a book on Goha, a middle eastern character that I only know of from the appliques I've seen. An article about the book can be found here. And yes, I know in the article the name of the shop is written as Fatouh but that's the problem with transliterating from arabic to english. Even on government signs you'll see placenames transliterated inconsistently into English. Anyway, I used the exact spelling from the business card they gave me.

For anyone who wants to see more examples of tentmaker applique, you can use the "search this blog" funtion in the upper left of this blog. That works pretty darn well. You can use the term "tentmaker" and get almost every post I've written on the subject.

Debbie, we don't have a chat room, but we certainly chat with one another through our blog entries and comments. Just start a blog and you can come play with us.