Can you introduce yourself and how Folkglory came to be?

My name is Salua Qidan. I am the typical child of a generation of Palestinians who were born in the early 1940s, witnessed the Nakba, studied abroad, and couldn’t return. I was born in 1971. My father is a Palestinian from Qalqilia, born in Salama near Jaffa; my mother is German, and I am also a Jordanian citizen living in Jordan. I am an architect by study and a cultural, graphic designer by practice.

In 2021 I established Folkglory as a result of over 17 years working closely with Widad Kawar on her projects and her unique museum, Tiraz – Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress, which houses the largest intact collection of Jordanian, Palestinian, and Syrian dresses dating back to the Ottoman period. Widad Kawar is the leading collector and authority on Palestinian and Arab dress heritage.

I was raised in Europe, but as a child I traveled to Qalqilia a lot. My encounter with traditional clothing was confined to these vacations and holiday family visits. Yet, because these clothes were so different from what I saw in my everyday life in Germany, they left many lasting memories. 

As an adult, working as a graphic designer in Jordan, traditional clothing was not something central to my life until I met Widad. She asked me to design her book, which was about the work of her life: how she began to collect, the story of the dresses in her collection, the women who gave her the dresses, and the fate they encountered after the Nakba in 1948 — basically, how so many dresses ended up with her. This was a turning point in my life and the beginning of my new path. 

Widad gave me a way to connect to my paternal history — to Palestine, which I had always been something I wanted, but I didn’t know how. During the book project, we had to map all the dresses according to their origin in their original villages, which gave me a special connection and understanding of the geography of many erased and destroyed villages, including Salama, the village my father is from and which we only used to hear about. Suddenly these villages came to life again through their dresses.

As I worked with Widad for several years, she allowed me, and later urged me, to study her collection in detail, to the point that I became very knowledgeable. I wondered what to do with all of this detailed knowledge. I felt it must be made available to everyone — but in an easy and understandable way, and at the same time deeply enough so that its essence and its rooted authenticity don’t get lost.

That’s how my venture, Folkglory, was born.

Folkglory aims to be a gateway for anyone who wants to learn and explore the folk craft traditions of the Levant, with a focus on Palestine. Our mission is to make these traditions accessible through contemporary, hands-on products that combine heritage education with creative practice. Blending research, curation, documentation, and design, we bring the indigenous knowledge like Tatreez, which is the name of the Palestinian traditional embroidery, to a global audience. 

Our first embroidery kits launched in 2021, developed together with our “Embroiderer-in-Chief” Adeela Subuh, a master embroiderer with over 35 years of experience in traditional Palestinian embroidery.

Tell us more about your studio and how the products are made?

 My studio is a home studio — both Adeela and I work from our homes. Between the idea and the realization of the actual emroidery kit product, there is a long process in between. A lot of research is done beforehand. The original traditional designs that inform our work are quite complex. So the challenge is always how to present something complicated in an easy way to people at beginner level. Also, the end result  of craft exercise in our kits should be something the person can use, be it frames, wall hangers as hoops or samplers.

If I want to elaborate on the process, it would be as follows:

– Selection of region: Each kit is rooted in the authentic identity of a specific region’s embroidery. We study physical garments and written sources to capture that uniqueness.

– Pattern research: Every village once had its own dress identity — fabrics, fashion, colours, and motifs differed from one village to another. To document this, we study hundreds of historic garments from the Tiraz Museum collection, my private archive, books, and oral histories shared by women who remember these traditions

– Development of heritage brochures: Each kit comes with brochures that contextualise the costumes, showing historical examples and explaining the origin and meaning of patterns.

– Stitch manuals: All patterns are re-embroidered step by step, photographed, and documented to guide today’s makers.

– Assembly: Kits include brochures, pattern cards, threads, canvases, and needles — even the card and fabric colours echo the colours of historic dresses (for example, red for Qalamon, blue for Gaza, white for Ramallah). All our materials are sourced, printed, and assembled in Jordan.

What inspires the designs on your embroidery kits?

My inspiration is the Palestinian native indigenous peasant woman. Her unique dress creations, in all their aspects, whether in patterns and their combinations or colours. These were all the result of her way of thinking and creativity. 

Most of the Palestinian village women were illiterate in the classic sense, and Tatreez was their way of communicating, like poetry. Through their embroidery they expressed their identity, their surroundings, their story, their ideas, their social status — everything.

The Palestinian villagers were a society that was very traditional and conservative, yet at the same time they were exposed to the outside world because of their location, being visited by pilgrims from all over the world. 

Their work was imaginative, symbolic, and deeply rooted in everyday life — and it continues to inspire everything we do at Folkglory. 

What is your favourite thing about creating embroidery kits

I love creating the visual design language of the kits — seeing how patterns interact with one another, and how to present them in a way that is both authentic and contemporary. It is a challenge to compact a vast and rich folk tradition into a single box. Widad Kawar fondly calls Folkglory “the boxes project,” and that description captures both the joy and the responsibility of our work. 

Do you have a favourite embroidery work you’d like to highlight?

 My favourites are the historic dresses from Gaza in Palestine. Their striped fuchsia, pink, green, and blue fabrics, combined with bold embroidery colours and patterns, are pure art in my eyes. What I admire most is the finesse and detail of the work, created under the limitations of materials and colours available at the time.

Folkglory embroidery sets are available in our shop and online. As part of our carefully curated bespoke range is focused on supporting small businesses in Palestine, celebrating Palestinian culture, and expanding on themes from the exhibition, Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine.