We have been stocking beautiful Tamay & Me garments in the handworked shop for some time now but we have just added some pieces to our website. We thought this would be a great time to tell you a bit about the story and ethos of this wonderful company.

Tamay & Me is a collaboration between Tamay and Hannah. The two became great friends in Vietnam, back in 2008, while Tamay was teaching Hannah how to make intricate Mien embroidery. They have been working together ever since to raise awareness of the Mien skills. They were later joined by Lucy from Mountain Threads Textiles and Cultures of northern Vietnam, which has allowed them to take the core Tamay & Me values to other villages around Sapa.

With the aim of helping women to earn a sustainable living and to maintain their textile heritage, it was Tamay & Me’s embroidered jackets which became the first step in this process. Each jacket has a remarkable story to tell:

The cotton and indigo are homegrown, without pesticides, in one village in North Vietnam. Tamay goes on a three hour motorbike journey to buy the cloth directly from the producers. The White Thai spend all year co-ordinating the planting, nurturing and harvesting of rice, cotton and indigo. Once the cotton is harvested it is beaten and stored, then spun and woven. The indigo dying of the cloth is a fermented alchemic process that mostly happens during the winter. The cloth is dipped three times a day for a period of one week - twenty-one dips in total. This gives the cloth a dark and rich colour.

Taphin is a small mountain village in the North of Vietnam near to Sapa and the Chinese border. Most of the people who live here are Mien and speak Mien as their first language. They identify themselves through their tiny counted stitch embroidery. Each year a woman will make a whole set of new clothes for herself and her family to celebrate the New Year in February. The more beautiful the embroidery the more respect a woman will have in the village. The symbols within the detailed work represent village life, rice paddies, children, parents, grandparents, trees, plants and fertility. The embroidery used in the Tamay & Me jackets, is reclaimed from these Mien old clothes, providing income for as many families as they can - Tamay is careful to select exquisite embroideries from families most in need of revenue at a certain time.

The future of embroidery in Taphin village is uncertain. In the last ten years, homes in the village have been connected to electricity, people now have rice cookers, lighting and smart phones. Children are now all entitled to free education and vast numbers of tourists visit the region each day. Life in the mountains is changing fast and the wish of Tamay and the rest of the team of sewers, is that the textile traditions can be maintained and past on to future generations. Tamay & Me have created wares to provide flexible work that fits within a traditional way of life, the children, the rice, the festivals and of course the embroidery. Tamay & Me hope this will support the traditional way of life and the textiles, whilst at the same time bringing choices and a sense of pride.

We absolutely love Tamay & Me’s garments, both in terms of their aesthetics, their stories and their intentions. It is a pleasure to be stocking their work both in our Penzance shop and online.

A big thank you to Tamay & Me for providing the information from which we have based this journal entry.

Introducing : Tamay & Me