Shui nationality horsetail embroidery

Name of China's national intangible cultural heritage: Shui nationality horsetail embroidery

Applicant: Sandu Shui Autonomous County, Guizhou Province

Project No.: 322

Project No.: Ⅶ - 23

Time of publication: 2006 (the first batch)

Category: traditional art

Region: Guizhou Province

Type: new item

Applicant: Sandu Shui Autonomous County, Guizhou Province

Protection unit: Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Center of Sandu Shui Autonomous County

Introduction to horsetail embroidery of Shui Nationality

Applicant: Sandu Shui Autonomous County, Guizhou Province

Sandu, the only Shui Autonomous County in China, is located in the southeast of Qiannan Buyi and Miao Autonomous Prefecture. Horsetail embroidery of Shui nationality is a special embroidery skill inherited by Shui women from generation to generation, which takes horsetail as an important raw material. This unique folk traditional craft of Shui people is distributed in the Shui villages of Sandong, Zhonghe, Tingpai, tangzhou, Shuilong and other towns in Sandu.

The origin of Shui People's horsetail embroidery can't be studied. The main products are horsetail embroidered strap and horsetail embroidered shoes. Horsetail is also used as raw material for weaving embroidery in Chengdu, Sichuan and other ethnic groups, but only the Shui people use it intensively for embroidery such as braces.

Shuizu horsetail embroidery has its own unique production techniques and methods. The first step is to take 3 to 4 horsetails as the core, and wind the white silk thread tightly on horsetail by hand, making it a prefabricated embroidery thread similar to bass strings. In the second step, the white silk horsetail core embroidery thread is embroidered on the outline of traditional embroidery or paper-cut patterns. In the third step, seven colored silk threads are woven into flat colored threads, which are embroidered in the middle of the outline of the pattern. The fourth step is to embroider the rest according to the usual flat embroidery, cross stitch, random stitch, skipping stitch and other embroidery techniques.

Horsetail embroidery technology is very complex. The embroidery made by this technology has a sense of relief, abstract, generalized and exaggerated modeling. Horsetail embroidery technology is mainly used to make children's strap (water language is called "evil knot") and embroidered shoes (water language is called "zhe knot"), women's waistband and chest tag, children's hat, purse, sheath sheath, etc. Although it has gone through the changes of times and environment, its modeling concept and stylized symbols are basically unchanged. Horsetail embroidered strap mainly consists of three parts. The upper part is the main pattern, which is composed of more than 20 pieces of horsetail embroidered pieces of different sizes. The surrounding frame is embroidered with big red or dark green silk thread on the color satin base to produce geometric patterns. The upper two sides are horsetail embroidered strap hands, and the lower part is the strap tail. There are exquisite horsetail embroidered patterns echoing with the main part, "evil knot" becomes the whole body A complete artwork of embroidery. It takes about a year to make such a knot. The middle-aged and old women of Shui nationality usually do not use paper-cut pattern to make "evil knot" tail flowers. Instead, they directly use prefabricated horsetail embroidery thread on red or blue satin. They use knot embroidery, flat stitch and random stitch to make flexible and beautiful patterns.

Unfortunately, due to social changes and other reasons, there is a serious fault in the inheritance of horsetail embroidery technology. The quality of modern horsetail embroidery products has declined, and people are rarely willing to use it. Therefore, the special category of horsetail embroidery of Shui nationality should be rescued and protected.