Pat Dalton believes embroidery is a universal language.
But in at least one culture, that language is dying.
That’s why Dalton has dedicated her life to preserving embroidery from poor, remote Chinese villages.
“It’s art and I don’t want it to die,” says Dalton, 65, who just returned from her 32nd trip to China.
Her home in unincorporated Douglas County is a virtual museum of Chinese and Japanese antiques and collectibles. Every room houses a treasure, from the 8-foot-tall screen depicting “A Dream of Red Mansion” in her dining room to the obi sashes from kimonos framed for display in her bathrooms.
Her most prized pieces are the needlework and embroidery she has gathered from the Miao village people, one of the country’s prominent ethnic minorities. They live in the Guizhou Province in southwest China, part of the region struck by this week’s earthquake.
Miao embroidered coats used to be passed down from mothers to daughters, who start learning the technique at age 6. One coat might take a mother hundreds of hours to stitch by hand. The beauty and the difficulty are apparent in the intricate patterns that result from 900 to 1,600 stitches per square inch of fabric.
Silk broken down into delicate filaments gives detail to embroidered faces. The highest quality are known as “two-sided embroidery,” or reversible patterns depicting the same images on both sides — a difficult technique that can take a woman five years to master.
Small embroidered panels on jacket sleeves, shoulders or hemlines are often worked separately, and then attached to handwoven garments. In most cases, pinched and pleated silk cords, folded silk, tiny cross stitches and braided ribbons must all be completed either by sunlight or a low-watt bulb.
But now, a “get it done, and get it sold” attitude has fostered a thicker and sloppier stitch that is undetectable to inexperienced collectors, Dalton says. The colors are flatter, and there is often no shading.
Village women have shown Dalton the difference between machine-produced replicas of their embroidery and the real thing. They rely on collectors like her to recognize and save their most precious textiles.
“Young people in China want to wear T-shirts and jeans,” says Dalton, a lifelong needlework enthusiast who started knitting in 1962. “My mission is to preserve these arts.”
Her company, Dalton Textile Tours, has hosted visits to China since 1996 to raise awareness about the country’s people, cultures and arts. Groups of up to 20 pay about $4,000 to visit remote villages during tours that last 17 to 23 days. Dalton generally makes two of these trips a year.
Visitors take something away from these sojourns, but they also leave something behind. In the past four years, Dalton and her supporters have donated 1,500 pairs of reading glasses to enable weavers to magnify tiny stitches, along with school supplies, needles and hundreds of bottles of glycerin.
Usually, women can’t weave or embroider during the wintertime because the harsh climate dries out their skin and makes it easy to snag precious silk. The glycerin keeps their skin soft so their work can continue year-round.
Dalton buys textiles ranging from $25 for smaller pieces to about $2,000. She sometimes sells the pieces at needlework seminars to earn money for future trips.
“There’s a common saying that all Chinese antiques come from factories,” Dalton says. “But the Miao people have no written languages, (so they ) pass their history and culture down through the designs in their embroidery. This cannot be lost.”
Sheba R. Wheeler: 303-954-1283 or swheeler@denverpost.com
