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Accessories

Şal Butası

₺2,500 · ≈ €45

Hand-embroidered bead by bead — glass seed beads, pearls and crystals worked onto felt, finished with a pin.

The buta of the kelaghayi, lifted off the silk and embroidered in greens.

Embroidered by hand — no two come out quite alike

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The buta — the almond-flame at the base of the Bakı type — is the first shape a kelaghayi master learns to carve. This brooch lifts it off the silk and rebuilds it in beadwork: four greens laid in rows that follow the curl, with a cut green stone at the heart where the woodblock would leave its deepest press.

Hand-embroidered bead by bead — glass seed beads, pearls and crystals worked onto felt, finished with a pin. Handle by the edges. Keep away from perfume and water, and store flat somewhere dry.

The Maker · Şəki, Azerbaijan

Embroidered by hand in Azerbaijan, one bead at a time, on the same bench as the silk.

The Story of Şəki Silk →

How it was made

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.

Where the figure comes from

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.

Living with it

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.

Şal Butası

₺2,500