Sampler diary, Cyprus

Archeological “drawings”

You may know I have a love for making embroidered samplers. I also have a love for archaeological architecture. In my holidays I visit those sites when I can. So I will later this year, when I go to Cyprus. I intend to visit the (Pre Ceramic) Neolithic village Khirokitia, which was founded around 7000 years before Christ, can you imagine?

Recently I read a book about it, in which my eyes fell on a beautiful ground plan of the site.

I loved the drawing in itself, especially all the circular forms struck me. To me they have a quite modern look and feel, now, 9000 years later! I immediately decided to embroider it. And the result…. you saw that at the beginning of this post.

To get some feeling how this village looks like … take a look at the photo below, where you see the site from an aerial point of view.

And this is how the village houses probably must have looked like 9000 years ago:

Making process

As I said I decided to embroider the plan. I drew it on soluvlies and then stitched it on fabric, after that I embroidered it with DMC yarn 1 thread. I used a firm, cotton fabric. When I was finished, I put it all in water to delete the soluvlies. The flexibility of the threads changed a little bit, they became a bit stiff.

Initially I also embroidered the grid the archaeologists used at the time for excavation, so many horizontal and vertical lines appeared. Later I decided to do things differently and removed them.

Wanna know more?

Lots of information can be found in this book (1997).

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