Accessories

Brooches embroidered bead by bead, by hand. They are not silk and they are not dyed — they are the other thing the same workshops make, and they are here because they finish a coat the way a scarf finishes a collar.

Each one is worked on a backing and built up in a single sitting, so no two carry the beads in quite the same order. The motifs come from the same vocabulary the scarves are named from: buta, flower heads, pomegranate.

Small, pinned, and made in the same numbers as everything else here — which is to say, not many.

This is embroidery, not dyeing. Glass seed beads, pearls and crystals are worked onto felt one at a time and the piece is finished with a pin on the back. Nothing about it is stamped, printed or cast; the only tool is a needle, and the only way to go faster is to use fewer beads.

Because a piece is built up in a single sitting, the beads never fall in quite the same order twice. Two brooches of the same design will differ in the way a line of stitching differs from another line of stitching — slightly, and everywhere.

The brooches are named the way the scarves are: an Azerbaijani name, left untranslated in every language, taken from what the piece depicts. Where the figure carries a story of its own — Qobustan’s rock carvings, Tıq-Tıq Xanım from the children’s tale, the pomegranate that stands for fertility and for the turn of the year — the name is that story’s name.

The motifs themselves come from the same vocabulary the silk is named from. The pomegranate, the leaf, the flower heads and the birds all appear on kelaghayi stamps, cut in pear wood or walnut; here they are set in glass instead of printed in wax. It is the same picture, made by a different hand at a different bench.

Beadwork on felt does not want water. Keep it dry, keep perfume and hairspray off it, and pin it through a layer that can take a pin rather than through fine knit or silk. Stored flat in a box it will outlast the coat you bought it for.

These are made in the same small numbers as everything else here. When one is gone it is gone; there is no second run of a piece that was embroidered by hand in an afternoon.