Before the First Stitch

I am about to begin making my own Palestinian thobe.

Even writing that sentence feels tender to me.

For the next six months, I will be participating in The Thobe Project, organized by the Canadian Palestinian Foundation of Quebec (CPFQ). It is a guided journey where a group of us will learn how to make our own thobes from the beginning: choosing our fabrics, taking our measurements, cutting, sewing, and eventually cross-stitching one of three preselected Palestinian designs — Gaza, Beer El Saba3, or Ramallah.

I am from the Ramallah area. Or at least, that is the part of the story I know.

And yet, I have chosen Gaza.

I chose Gaza because there are places we carry even before we have touched them. Gaza is one of those places for me. It is part of the Palestine I know through longing, through grief, through news, through prayer, through the voices of its people, through the beauty that survives even under the most impossible conditions. I have never had the chance to visit Gaza. I have never walked its streets, sat by its sea, or known its light in the way a place can only be known by the body. But I have loved it from afar, as so many Palestinians in diaspora are asked to love — across borders, across absence, across ache.

Choosing the Gaza design is my way of honouring the people there. It is my way of preserving, in whatever small and humble way I can, the beauty, culture, artistry, and dignity of a place that has given so much to the Palestinian story. A place too often spoken of only through devastation, when it is also a place of embroidery, song, sea, mothers, markets, laughter, intelligence, stubborn life, and breathtaking beauty.

This thobe will not make me from Gaza. I would never claim that. But perhaps it can make me a witness to Gaza. Perhaps it can let my hands say what my words cannot fully hold.

Every stitch leaves athar (أثر) — a trace of what remains.

Before I begin, I find myself thinking about my Teta.

During my summers in Palestine, she taught me how to cross-stitch. I do not know if I understood then what she was really giving me. As a child, I thought I was learning a skill. A pattern. A way to hold thread. A way to make small X’s appear in neat rows across fabric.

But now, decades later, I understand that she was giving me a doorway.

I remember the breezy Ramallah summer evenings. The kind of evenings that softened the heat of the day and made everything feel briefly possible. I remember sitting together, thread in hand, learning the rhythm of the needle. In and out. Across and back. One small stitch beside another.

There was something quiet about it. Something intimate. The world did not need to announce itself loudly in those moments. It was enough to sit near my grandmother. It was enough to watch her hands. It was enough to be taught.

I wonder now what she carried in her own hands. What memories lived there. What griefs. What patience. What knowledge she may have inherited without ever calling it inheritance. What she was preserving simply by doing what Palestinian women had done for generations: making beauty with discipline, making identity with thread, making memory visible.

I do not remember every word she said. I do not remember every pattern. But I remember the feeling.

The air.
The closeness.
The tenderness of being taught.
The way cross-stitching slowed time down.
The way my hands belonged to something older than me.

This project is bringing me back there.

Not back in a simple way. Not back untouched by time. I am no longer the girl sitting beside her Teta in Palestine. I am a Palestinian woman of diaspora, shaped by Kuwait, Canada, Palestine, distance, return, grief, and all the complicated silences that live between those places.

I have spent much of my life carrying Palestine as beauty. Summers. Family. Food. Stone. Hills. Language. Embroidery. Laughter. The smell of the evening. The pride in my mother’s eyes when she held a thobe like treasure.

But beauty is not the whole story.

There are other memories too. Harder ones. Memories I did not always know how to keep. Memories I may have folded away because I needed to survive, to adapt, to become legible in Canada, to explain myself less, to move through the world without always feeling split open.

This thobe is asking me to unfold some of that.

It is asking me to return not only to the Palestine I loved, but to the Palestine I buried. To the histories I know and the histories I do not know. To the lineage that reaches back only so far before the records become thin, before memory becomes interrupted, before the map becomes a question.

It is asking me to sit with the ache of not knowing everything.

And still begin.

That is why this project matters to me.

I am not making a costume.
I am not making an object.
I am not making something decorative.

I am making a thobe as a memoir.

A garment that will hold memory in its seams. A story written through fabric. A record of what returns when the hands begin to remember.

Over these next six months, I will be documenting the process here: the choosing of fabric, the taking of measurements, the cutting, the sewing, the stitching, and the memories that rise along the way. Some reflections may be about Palestine. Some about my mother and the thobes she collected with such pride. Some about my grandmother. Some about growing up Palestinian in Canada. Some about what it means to belong to a place you have loved, lost, inherited, questioned, and longed for all at once.

I imagine there will be beauty.

I also imagine there will be grief.

But I want to make room for both.

Because perhaps that is what the thobe has always done. It carries celebration and sorrow. Village and exile. Womanhood and history. The personal and the collective. The visible and the hidden. It is worn on the body, but it also holds what the body cannot always say.

When my Teta taught me to cross-stitch, I do not think either of us knew that one day I would return to it like this. That one day, from Canada, I would pick up the thread again not only to make something beautiful, but to find my way back to a part of myself.

But maybe the stitch knew.

Maybe the stitch remembers what we forget.
Maybe the hand remembers what history tries to erase.
Maybe the thobe remembers the woman before she remembers herself.

This is where I begin.

Before the first stitch.
Before the fabric is cut.
Before the pattern is complete.

With Gaza in my hands.
With Ramallah in my memory.
With my Teta beside me in the breeze.
With my mother’s love of thobes behind me.
With all that I know, and all that I do not know.

And with a single hope:

That every stitch will leave an athar (أثر) — a trace of what remains.