Wenzhou Hair Embroidery is one of the famous traditional crafts in Zhejiang Province. Derived from a craft popular in the Yuan Dynasty (1206-1368), it was later innovated to show distinct local features and fine workmanship, thus highly collectable. With human hair adopted instead of conventional silk threads and by superb artistic techniques, the embroidery can obtain a unique touch, elegant color as well as natural and rich brightness changes so as to vividly represent life, particularly a figure’s personality. In the embroidering, either single-color or multiple-color hair is adopted. The former’s hair comes from people of one single racial group, and the latter from different groups. Human hair has its natural colors of black, white, grey, yellow, etc with softness and brightness, and hair embroidering methods can include back stitch, rolling stitch, streak stitch, slanting stitch and others. Suitable hair and methods need to be selected to produce ideal calligraphy and drawings which have close stitches, elegant style and an effect similar to that of a line drawing in traditional Chinese painting. |