I come from a beautiful village in Crete island, where it is customary even to this day for the girls to learn to embroider from a young age.
As a child I spent all of my summers in Crete, with my grandmother. Every afternoon, at the family gatherings in the back yard, my mother and my grandmother taught me how to embroider.

Keeping the tradition, while I was waiting for my daughters birth, 29 years and 26 years ago, I embroidered their baby sheets with my own designs. I still remember how happy my daughters were before falling asleep, talking to the fairytale’s heroes on their sheets!

The summer of 2012 I was forced to quit my job after 33 years and as an effect I started to be engaged with something I always loved, but never had the time to deal with. That summer I visited Crete again and while I was waiting for my niece to get born, I started creating her dowry, sheets and blankets from my own designs. The result was amazing! Everyone loved it! After this, my daughters and friends urged me to get involved professionally with embroidery.

The work that I do with my hands is something that offers me love, satisfaction, dignity, self respect, pride ad happiness. If you consider the fact that I used to work in an office for 12-14 hours for 33 years and now I am working in my back yard under the shade of a lemon tree, I am sure you will understand all these feelings that I get being involved in this.

Everything begins with the inspiration: I choose the fairytale I want to depict and I start reading it, searching for images in books, magazines and online until I am satisfied with the material to synthesize the representation of the fairytale. When I reach to a decision, I imprint the design to a rice paper and then I use a carbon paper to mark the design on the textile. I choose the threads depending on the mood but I also stay faithful to the original colors of each fairytale. Like the painter cannot recreate exactly the same painting, thereby my handmade creations are unique and differ from each other.

I enormously love what I do, because it reminds me of my childhood and the years when I was expecting a baby. It helps me to escape the daily routine and to put my energy on something that is made for the little pure souls expected to come to this world.

Through my work I believe that I express the power of the uniqueness, of the creativity and last but not least of the preservation of cretan/greek tradition. Above all, through my work i express my love for the child and my goal is to make smiling faces while sleeping in fairytales.

Love,
Argyro