Tran Thu Ha – Hand-Embroidered Hair Accessories
Sometimes the smallest objects require a surprising amount of patience.
Tran Thu Ha makes hair clips and headbands decorated with tiny floral embroideries. Flowers, leaves and little branches are stitched directly onto fabric-covered bases, turning something as ordinary as a hair clip into a miniature piece of textile work.
Flowers in thread
Most of Ha's designs are floral, but within that theme there is quite a lot of variation.
Some are bright and playful, others use muted greens, browns and creams. A few stitches form petals, others build leaves and stems, and small knots become flower centres or tiny berries.
What looks effortless when finished is, of course, nothing of the sort. Even a small flower consists of many individual stitches, and the proportions have to work on a surface only a few centimetres wide.
Work that fits around life
When we first introduced Ha's work at Avanova, she was making the pieces from home. This allowed her to continue working creatively while also being there for her two young daughters.
I like that aspect of small-scale craft businesses because they rarely fit neatly into the usual picture of a company.
A workshop may be a dedicated studio, but it can just as easily be a table at home. Production happens between family life, everyday obligations and all the other things that refuse to respect a business schedule.
The result is still real work.
Small differences are part of the point
With hand embroidery, two pieces made from the same basic design will never be perfectly identical.
A flower may sit a millimetre further to one side. A stitch may curve slightly differently. The balance between the leaves changes. None of this is a defect to be corrected; it is evidence that somebody actually made the thing.
That is one of the reasons we enjoy working with small makers in the first place. Industrial production is extremely good at removing variation. Handwork gives some of it back.
Tran Thu Ha
Ha's pieces first came to Avanova because Sang found her work in Vietnam and we simply liked it.
There does not need to be a more complicated explanation than that.
A small object, a few colours of thread, somebody with the patience and skill to turn them into something beautiful – that is exactly the kind of work our People & Craft section exists to preserve.
If you would like to know whether we currently have pieces by Tran Thu Ha available, you can contact us.