Hand Embroidery – Machine Embroidery and The Soul of Products

First of all, I want to affirm that hand embroidery is an artistic and creative profession. It’s almost like drawing. And hand embroidered products are not just goods, they are also works of art.

Start with machine embroidery. To be honest, to me, machine embroidery products are just simple products, they no longer carry the so-called art, meaning the intangible value surrounding them has completely disappeared. For machine embroidery, you simply program the embroidery machine according to the correct pattern, size, and color.

Then the machine will coldly do its job. For machine embroidery, the products must be in bulk and large quantities. Because no one wastes time on an embroidery machine if it only produces a few pieces. Machine embroidery has high productivity, so its price is lower. The quality of machine embroidery products will be uniform, a thousand pieces are the same. There is one thing that I think machine embroidery cannot do, which is many complex patterns that require meticulousness and trimming in each thread.

What about hand embroidery clothing? Hand embroidery is done by “a machine that runs on rice” (we Vietnamese often joke like that), it takes a lot of time and programming training to be able to embroider it, not to mention beautiful. Hand embroidery is a job that may seem boring to outsiders. The embroiderer must sit in one place, with needles and colored threads. They kept moving the needles up and down. And their work continues for hours.

Think about it, if you spent a lot of time making something with your own hands, would you feel happy when you finished it? Do you appreciate that object, and does it have a soul? Absolutely yes. One time, I held an embroidered handkerchief given to me by my mother (a traditional Vietnamese embroiderer). The scarf was still warm from her warmth, and for some reason, I felt moved. Hand embroidery is not easy, sometimes you have to embroider over and over again to get it satisfied.

Therefore, hand embroidery productivity is limited. The quality of the product depends on the skill of the embroiderer and their mood while embroidering. There are motifs that not everyone can embroider, but only the best craftsmen with the most delicate hands can embroider them satisfactorily.

As someone who has been exposed to embroidery since childhood, I understand that the most difficult thing when embroidering is to describe the soul of the pattern. Typically, the facial features of a person or the appearance of an animal. To express these things requires the sophistication and skill of the embroiderer. But I firmly believe that no machine can do it. With the same pattern, two embroiderers will give us different feelings. Or the same person, with different moods, also produce different products. That is called the soul of the product, the most precious and most cherishable thing!

So do you understand why K-Embroidery products are loved around the world? Simply because our products are 100% hand-smoked. As The Biggest Embroidery Factory in Vietnam, we hope that Vietnamese-processed products will be accessible to all customers in the world.