INDIGOS, 12/26
I embroider for relaxation, and my eye is always drawn to textiles and embroidery used for decoration, like the beautiful quilts at my Kaiser Permanente office.
Mostly now I do counted-thread cross stitch, though I've tried crewel work and other techniques. It's absorbing, though not difficult, and it seems to have much the same calming effect as meditation, which I'm not good at because I can't turn off my thoughts unless I have something in hand to focus on.
But I'm not a serious scholar of embroidery styles, and so I was surprised and delighted earlier this month to discover one quite new to me. A friend and I were browsing through the galleries in Denver's Golden Triangle, looking for Christmas gifts, and found ourselves in Indigos, on 13th Avenue between Bannock and Cheriokee streets.
Lori and Erin Nelson at Indigos carry ''nakshi kantha,'' a Bangladeshi folk tradition that, like American piecework quilts, resuses worn fabrics. Several layers of material, for instance from old saris, are quilted together and the top layer is embroidered with folk motifs and scenese from everyday life.
We saw one large piece, perhaps two feet by three, which seemed to be a sly commentary on all the tropes of colonial life — beefy men playing polo on spindly ponies, cobras swaying in baskets, tiger hunts from elephant-back. But most are gentle portraits of women visiting on market day or fisherman racing their narrow boats on the river.
If you're wondering what it looks like, I found an example of nakshi kantha on the Web, at www.e.kth.se/(tilde)e93(underscore)mra/si.gif.
Indigos gets its nakski kantha from a program in Dhaka, ''The Widow's Friend,'' which is part of a ministry called ''Friends of Bangladesh.'' More than a hundred women, most of them widows who have no other way of supporting themselves, are taught how to do the traditional embroidery. A few of them specialize in doing eyes and faces for all the others.
The women in the center also learn to read, which only about 10 percent of Bangladeshi women can do.
I wanted to write something sweet and non-controversial for Christmas, but it turns out people disagree even about embroidery. The site for the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development, which has a project in Bangladesh, dismisses traditional crafts.
''All too often,'' it says, ''women still take on work such as embroidery or crocheting that, although in the local tradition, neither earns them much nor helps them to become independent.''
But others recognize that there is a market for handcrafted work even in this age of mass production. An organization called Ten Thousand Villages, under the auspices of the Mennonite Church, buys and distributes hand-made items through a chain of stores. One, using the Ten Thousand Villages name, is at 280 Columbine St. in Cherry Creek North. They have nakshi kantha Christmas stockings, they told me. Another store is Crossroads, in La Junta.