I really wonder why do they not know how to count their own blessings anymore. As for today's Art Appreciation I would like to introduce Paul and Dorothy Lacy which I knew them through a friend of mine, Jill Davey.
They have a story to share about their encounter on Miao embroidery culture as well as to help the Miao ladies for a better living. Hopefully their story I'm sharing out today will enlighten more people to change their views in life and be grateful of whatever we have. A really good story from Paul & Dorothy and a very good piece of handmade artwork! Kudos!! Here we go!!
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The Journey Begins
In our travels to central China we happened upon the Miao minority peoples and fell in love with them and their exquisite hand embroidery. We bought some of their small embroidered bags and took them back to the USA where we were from. After an enthusiastic reception from friends, we made more trips back to this remote region of China and began to work with a local couple to produce bags for us. Meanwhile we were living in the US and began to develop a market for these bags by selling at local craft fairs and attending wholesale trade shows.
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| Dorothy with a group of Miao village women in the traditional costumes |
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| Paul in the midst of a Miao market day |
By the winter of 2004 we knew we needed to make a big change if we were to be able to market these products in good conscience to buyers in America. During our trip to Fenghuang in February 2004 we made the leap and bought a 3 storey house on a hill 110 steps up from the nearest road. It seemed a bit wild at the time considering that we were both nearing 60 and didn’t speak Chinese, but with the help of our local friends, we went forward and started a small factory on the second floor of our home. This was the point at which we brought everything in-house and sourced for good quality fabrics and zippers in Guangzhou and Hong Kong and redesigned our handbags to better reflect the styles that American women might like.
Our Miao friends ran the factory and Mrs. Liu started traveling out to the Miao villages in the countryside to engage as many women as possible to do the embroidery for us. Unbeknownst to us, she was trying to build up a huge supply of the embroideries thinking the demand from the American side would be overwhelming. But unfortunately we were back to the quality problems again and seeing as we were still living in America and trying to operate the factory from afar, we still were not able to produce the products we wanted to present to the American market.
We also had another consideration, that of wanting to become a fair trade business and provide our workers with the best working conditions possible and to be able to provide good employment for the local Miao women. Mrs. Liu was operating the factory 10 hours a day 7 days a week. The only answer for us was to move to China and run the factory ourselves. We packed up our business in Maine and trucked it all down south to Georgia where we had some folks willing to take on the running of the American warehouse and office, freeing us up to move to China in the fall of 2006.
Now our lives are entwined with the Miao people. The women arrive at 8 in the morning and we hear the humming of the sewing machines from our bedroom, located on the second floor right outside the sewing room. When we emerge for the day, we walk through the sewing room and down to our living room which is often filled with the Miao ladies who have come to bring us their embroideries. We have felt God’s grace to be able to live in such a communal environment and are blessed to be here: blessed to be a blessing to these beautiful Miao women.
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| Jin Xiang sewing our products |
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| The Lacys with their employees |
Most of our embroidery ladies cannot speak Chinese, only their local Miao language. These are women who would not be able to work in the general marketplace either here in our small tourist city or in the larger factories elsewhere in China. We heard about one such factory though that only hires MiaoMiao speaking ladies. They can work at home embroidering for our products and take care of their children. They come here and are treated with love and respect and can communicate in their Miao language.
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| Miao embroidery ladies in our living room |
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| Miao ladies embroidering in the village |
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| Paul and Dorothy with embroidery ladies in the village |
Even with the good conditions that our Miao ladies have here, we are still exploring other ways we can bless them and their families. We discovered that these women were struggling so much in order to pay for the school fees of their high school and college children and we have just initiated a scholarship fund with which we will pay for half of their school fees as long as the students keep their grades up. There is a village, where the women have been embroidering for us for 6 years, that has a very poor water supply. We have begun to investigate how we might help provide clean water for them. In another village we have met a young woman who was thrust into the role of being the preschool and kindergarten teacher with no training whatsoever. One of our expat colleagues has been trained to train teachers and plans on helping this young woman with her teaching skills.
The Miao have embroidered on their costumes for hundreds of years using the themes of birds, butterflies and flowers. As we worked with them to have them embroider flowers on our products, they embroidered the flower patterns in the same style as they used on their costumes. You can see some of the original embroidery in this bag:
Then take a look at the transition we made in 2007 to stylize and improve on this pattern of embroidery. At this point we moved from using the local embroidery threads which tended to run to using the DMC threads which are color fast and have a more reliable range of colors. Here is a Large Zippered Tote using this same flower theme:
Note that the bottom flower pattern is the same as the original flower patterns the Miao ladies had designed for us a few years earlier, but now the color is better and the patterns are more refined. As we developed our new patterns, we began to train more Miao ladies to do this kind of embroidery. At first it was just the older ladies who could embroider this way for us, but soon the younger ones began to flock to our door wanting to learn this skill. We soon developed a training kit and began to teach them our designs and specifications. Here are some of the ladies flocking to our gate a couple of years ago:
In the last couple of years we have developed other colors and patterns which have been possible because of the beautiful DMC cotton threads. You can check out all our products at our website: http://www.chinaethniccrafts.com/index.html.
The flowers are gorgeous and we have gotten restless lately for a change. Last winter we had a young Miao college student interning with us and she learned how to draw the Miao embroidery patterns from her mother. She started drawing these gorgeous butterflies and soon we were developing them into products. To these butterfly patterns we challenged our embroidery ladies with adding words. These lovely ladies (who cannot read or write their own language let alone English) are so skilled and soon they were crafting words on our products such as “peace”, “shalom”, “grace” and “agape”. We have also started to use more lively colors as you can see in this small clutch:
The flowers are gorgeous and we have gotten restless lately for a change. Last winter we had a young Miao college student interning with us and she learned how to draw the Miao embroidery patterns from her mother. She started drawing these gorgeous butterflies and soon we were developing them into products. To these butterfly patterns we challenged our embroidery ladies with adding words. These lovely ladies (who cannot read or write their own language let alone English) are so skilled and soon they were crafting words on our products such as “peace”, “shalom”, “grace” and “agape”. We have also started to use more lively colors as you can see in this small clutch:
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Thank you very much Paul & Dorothy for the wonderful part of your walks of life story. I seriously enjoy it very much and I hope more people would enjoy this as much as I do.
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Text > -babYmilZ-
Special Thanks > Dorothy Lacy
