Product Mission Artistic Collaboration Mailing List Contact Us

Press

Artistic collaboration

Because there is no traditional embroidery in Honduras, we asked Dallas artist Pamela Nelson to design the first pillows and table runners for us so that the products would appeal to customers in the United States. Pamela’s paintings and collages are influenced by the quilting and embroidery she saw watched grandmother do so they readily translate into fabric art. One of the women who’s worked with this project from the start of the first co-op is designer Barbara Velhum. She has also designed several pieces for Honduras Threads. Our products are an artistic collaboration in which the Honduran women take Pamela’s and Barbara’s line art and add their own art with their selections of colors, fabrics and embroidery stitches.

Materials

We buy the background fabrics, primarily cotton twill, in Honduras. The appliqué fabrics are donated in the United States. Some come from closet fabric stashes, others from decorator showrooms in the Dallas Design District. We all love the fact that these otherwise wasted fabrics are being well used and that each of the pieces are unique. The embroidery is done in high quality DMC or Anchor perle cotton, and some thinner threads are used for details.

All of the embroidery is done by hand. Each co-op has a sewing machine to sew the backing on the pillows and table runners. Because two of the communities where the co-ops are have no electricity, Honduras Threads bought them generators as part of their start-up. They power up the generator once a week to iron on the appliqués to prepare new pieces for embroidering and to use the sewing machine to close the finished pieces.