Shouson Hand Embroidery Canton Silk Shirt - Black
— Chinese Canton Silk - Xiang Yun Sha
— Hand Dyed with with Ju-Liang Root
— Hand Embroidered in Suzhou
— Each piece takes around 3-4 weeks for the artisan to finish the embroidery
— Each piece will have its own distinctive embroidery and pattern
— Each piece is labelled with a vintage Miao tribe batik dye tab
— Limited quantity
*Please note actual colour and pattern may vary from product image, due to their nature of being handmade.
Product Description
The Shouson Hand Embroidery Silk Shirt (Black) are also crafted using Canton Silk, also called Xiang Yun Sha in Chinese, which originates from the Canton Region in China. Its distinctive colouration, dull black on one side and reddish-brown on the other, is unique to this fabric alone. It is a result of dying the silk in Ju-Liang Root juice for thirty or more cycles, then coating one side with a layer of mud steeped in iron ions. This process must be performed under the summer sun which appears only from April to September.
For the embroidery, we decided to incorporate the Su Embroidery technique. It is one of the four pre-eminent schools of Chinese embroidery – Su Embroidery in Suzhou, Xiang Embroidery in Hunan, Shu Embroidery in Sichuan and Yue Embroidery in Guangdong. Su Embroidery is one of the oldest embroidery techniques in the world. Traditionally handed down from mother to daughter, Su embroidery is an art form that takes decades to master. From design and stitching to mounting and framing, a single piece of handmade Su Embroidery art usually takes months to create. Su Embroidery is renowned for its subtle yet refined needlework and its embrace of distinct stitching techniques. Two well-regarded techniques are ‘even embroidery’, which stresses uniformity and avoids overlapping threads to create photorealistic designs, and ‘random embroidery’, which forgoes uniformity and encourages oblique and crossing lines of different types of threads to create more expressive designs.
The Shouson Hand Embroidered Silk Shirt (Black) showcases our sparrow painting design. It features a relaxed cutting and is fitted with a mandarin collar. As with all our other products, a batik dyed tab, designed and crafted by Miao Tribe artisans, is tailored into these shirts. An artisan applies a "resist" process on the fabric to generate the unique patterns, whereby specific areas are covered with wax to prevent the dye from penetrating the cloth and leaving deliberate blank spots in the fabric.