Artisan Maysoon Abu Karam from the city of Shahba in As-Suwayda Governorate has leveraged her years of experience in manual embroidery to launch a new project featuring embroidery on burlap sacks to produce artistic paintings and decor pieces.
The project, which the 50-year-old Maysoon launched about a year ago, came, as she mentioned in her interview with ”SANA”, with the goal of moving away from traditional work and offering eye-catching, aesthetically pleasing items, especially after developing a love for working with burlap and receiving positive feedback and admiration for products of this kind.
Maysoon, a member of the Artisanal Association for Oriental Crafts, applies her skill to burlap sacks, where she draws the designs she desires, benefiting from her experience and talent in drawing, then embroiders them with a needle using threads of different colors, noting that her work requires precision, patience, and special handling of the raw material.
Maysoon has displayed samples of her project's work in several exhibitions, including the Flower Show in Damascus and an environmental exhibition in Jaramana in Rif Dimashq, expressing her ambition to expand this project and achieve widespread reach among the largest number of interested people, especially since what she offers in her new project adds to a rich experience in artistic manual work that she began more than 17 years ago, after overcoming the challenges of a liver disease from which she recovered.
In creating her art, she relies, as she puts it, on recycled environmental materials and fabrics. She has utilized burlap and nylon sacks to manufacture women's bags, curtains, and decorative pieces. She has also employed tree bark on fabric backgrounds to form portraits of human faces, created paintings from recycled environmental waste, and crafted artistic models from twigs, pottery, and other materials. Additionally, she has trained many women over the past period, through the Rural Women's Department across the governorate's villages, on recycling nylon sacks.
