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Embroidery was the most widespread folk creation of Uzbek women. The work was done by girls and women. The embroidery of the settled population was an inalienable part of the traditional interior; it decorated different accessories from small objects to monumental panels. It was found on wall panels like suzane, zardevors, kurpachi, bedspreads (choshabi or ruidjo), pray-rugs (joynamoz), table-clothes (dastarkhan}, babies' cradle covers (beshikpush} and skull-caps.
The embroidery of nomadic and semi-nomadic people of the Republic found its most colorful expression in clothes and in small objects. Embroidery was used to decorate men's festive gowns, belt-shawls, women's wedding cloaks, sheaths for knives, tea cosies, mirrors and purses.
At the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries the investigators of this craft point to the development of artistic tendencies in distinctive schools differing in their use of ornamental motifs, composition and pattern and color combinations, and by the nineteenth century there were important centers of artistic embroidery in Nurata, Bukhara, Samarkand, Shakhrisabz, Tashkent and Fergana, each of them possessing its local artistic peculiarities.
Thus an original style of embroidery arose at the end of the nineteenth century in Nurata. It used colored flowers spread across a white background of fabric. From the point of view of wealth and variety of colored motifs the patterns take a leading place in artistic embroidery of Uzbekistan. Frequently plant designs are accompanied by birds, sometimes in hardly perceptible places, as well as highly stylized representations of animals and people. The most prevalent composition has an eight-pointed star in the middle and four large aromas in the corners. This composition is named chor shokhuyak mokh, meaning «four twigs and the moon» in Tadjik. The remaining motifs are found in the space between the main designs. Another type of ornamental composition is a rhomboid latticework of delicate leaves (toba-doni, meaning latticed). Its cells are filled with branches of flowers, rosettes, of birds and animals.
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The embroidery of Bukhara is among the most interesting in Central Asia. A typical Bukhara design consists of flowers on thin branches evenly distributed over the surface of cloth, or round rosettes framed with long stems, in a harmonious combination of blue, grey and light yellow with red, raspberry and green.
The embroidery of Samarkand is distinguishable from Nurata and Bukhara work by its greatly simplified design consisting of an arrangement of rosettes surrounded by leafy circles and a restricted pallette with a predominance of lilac.
In the ornament of Shakhrisabz embroidery, like that of Samarkand, the central place is occupied by a large rosette with multicolored details in blue leafy garlands. Sometimes the central motif is a lyrical composition of plant motifs with a border of large ornaments and circles. Several varieties of skull-caps are also made in Shakhrisabz. The color pallette of the embroidery is based on a few main tones: raspberry, green and red. In Tashkent there are two kinds of large decorative embroideries like suzane from other districts: palak (from falak meaning «firmament») and gulkurpa. The entire surface of the Tashkent palak is covered with solid embroidered symbols and dark red circles. The composition of the gulkurpa and choishabov is built with the help of a central star or circle and twigs with flowers leaving a larger area of the bare ground exposed.
The embroideries of the Fergana valley are distinguished by their thin graphic design of twigs and concentric rings leaving large areas of vacant space in the background. The work of the Fergana craftswoman is done in a colored background. Mainly ruidjo and skull-caps are produced; large embroideries like gulkurpa and suzane are rarer.
The great decorative embroideries of Fergana with their slim; elegant lines, reminds one of skullcaps. Their coloring is built on the contrast of light and dark forms. Exceptionally gifted kalamkoshi women painters worked over the designs. Their art was respected, and was often inherited from mother to daughter. Depending on the subject chosen, the kalamkoshi chose the shape, size and composition of the embroidery. The decorative embroidery of Uzbekistan up to the end of the 1880s was made on a special matt white fabric called karbos, or on matt natural yellowish mallya. From the 1880s onward primitive local fabrics of violet and orange colors were used for the background, as well as imported white and colored cotton fabrics.
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Local silk threads were used, colored with natural plant dyes; the beauty of embroideries produced up to the beginning of the 20 th century is largely due to the soft color harmony and subtle play of light obtained by natural dyed silk threads. Since the end of the 1890s and up to the present day silk has been dyed with aniline dyes, and the resulting harsh color contrasts cannot be compared with the beautiful coloring of nineteenth century work.
Characteristic of the embroidery of Uzbekistan is the original sewing technique with a complete seam on the large surface of the design, in which a small space of background is sometimes left open. There are various types of one-sided smooth enclosed and chain stitch also used for filling the ornamental motifs. There are two types of smooth enclosed stitch: bosma and kanda-khael.
The technology of sewing is as follows: the thread is tightened along the length of the design from one edge to the other and then gripped with a transverse stitch. The next thread lies close to the first and is also fastened with stitches. In basma, seam stitches are small and almost perpendicular, with a slight inclination with regard to the strained length of the thread. Basma achieves a fine, regular execution with large intervals between the lines of small stitches. In the kanda-khael sewing technique the lengthwise thread, as in basma stitch, lies along the length of the declivity of the motif of fastened thread.
In some districts of Uzbekistan chain stitches called urma and darafsh were used for embroidering suzane. Chain is one of the most ancient stitches, and in Uzbek work sewn by chain stitch all the surface is covered with ornamental motifs, not allowing any light to penetrate. Sewing was done in this way: the outline of the sewn ornamental motif was outlined in chain stitch, then a second row was added inside lying close to the first and so on until the shape from the edge up to the middle is filled with embroidery. Chain embroidery was carried out with a needle or hook on embroidery frames. From the end of the nineteenth century the tambour machine appeared which is used up to the present time to produce decorative embroideries.
Different techniques were often used in the same piece, according to the type of rhythm required. For example, in flower motifs alternate petals are sewn with basma or chain, or basma and kanda-kbael. Often plant stems or the bands separating the border from the central field were sewn with one-sided or two-sided stitched seam (ilmak). In different centers of embroidery one particular sewing style was preferred to others. Thus, basma was used more in Nurata, Samarkand and Tashkent, kanda-kbael characterised works of Shakhrisabz, and Bukhara possessed the technology of chain embroidery. In Shakhrisabz and in Kitab for the big decora-tive embroideries iroki stitch was used.
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