I have 7 uncles on my mother’s side. But for 2 the rest were craft enthusiasts. One of them still is. She does a lot of Huck embroidery. Her son-in-law is an engineer in the army and they get free army issue toweling cloth (I don’t know why this fabric is called so, maybe they were originally issued to be used as towels) on which this style of embroidery is done. Every time she visits her daughter in Delhi, she gets together with the neighbors to embroider. The funny thing is my aunt speaks only Tamil or Telugu and her embroidery friends speak only Hindi. God knows how they manage to communicate. But she comes back with a lot of lovely patterns copied from somebody’s grandmother’s shopping bag or somebody’s mother-in-law’s tablecloth embroidered some 20 – 50 years ago. And every time I visit her, I have something new to add to my collection.
Over the years I have accumulated quite a few patterns myself, some from my own grandmother, some from my mother’s imagination, some others from my school days, some from the collections of my students’ mothers or mothers – in – law. I found it mostly done on shopping bags.
While researching the subject recently, I found this blog
Swedish Huck Embroidery has posted some samples and the pictures are very clear.
Complete Guide to Needlework – A Reader’s Digest Publication has a chapter on this topic.
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