gold stitching

Tuesday evening my aunt guided toward a wonderful discovery. We stopped by the gold stitching studio called Ubrus at the local cathedral. WOW was all I was able to say... They have a wonderfully informative website, unfortunately all in Russian. The most basic explanation for what the women in this studio do is that they embroider icons, clothes and coverings for various Russian Orthodox churches. The studio is equipped with tables that they stretch the embroideries on, and the ladies sit and embroider with gold, silver, beads, pearls and anything you can imagine. The work is all stunningly beautiful and so perfect that it is hard to believe that human hands made it and not machine. But then again only human hand can produce such perfection. Here's a few views of the sun filled studio, which is quite small actually, but the 10 foot tall ceilings make it look huge. And here are the ladies at work.They uncovered some of their work for my camera as they usually only keep open the small area they are working on. The rest is covered by cloth to protect from dirt and some of the women wear sleeve guards too. They also make Christmas ornaments and Easter eggs. The studio produces an incredibly detailed magazine that has instruction and how to and history of the art, and you better believe that I bought all the available back issues! They also sell instructional DVD's, but I restrained myself for now....