Embroidery Workshop in Hoi An

Handcraft in Vietnam is still a very popular branch of work and artisans spend years mastering their craft. While some stay close to traditional designs, others have modernised. Embroidery is still done the same way today as it was done hundreds of years ago: With a needle and a thread, stitching a design into a cloth that is held in hand or clamped into an embroidery hoop. At an embroidery workshop in Hoi An you can try your hand at this ancient craft, with a design of your choice. As modern or traditional as you want it to be.

Hop Handi

Hop Handi is a small shop right at the edge of Hoi An Market, with everything embroidery. They sell hair-bows, notebooks, pocket-mirrors and many more things with beautiful embroidered designs. You can even order a custom design from them. The have another location in Da Nang.

Their most popular motives are flowers and leaves, but you can also order anime or a logo or anything else really that has a reasonable outline and colouring and you can bring a picture of. You can pick the cover colour, as well as the inside of the notebook (lines or blank) and which way you’d like the cover to face (left to right or right to left).

The cost of the notebook depends on your design, but is generally from 500k upwards, as hours of work go into it.

Embroidery Workshop in Hoi An

We started the workshop by drawing the outline of the motive, an adorable design by @nagarnia_art onto my chosen cloth. Afterwards I got to chose the threads I would be working with, seven different ones, even for a small and relatively simple picture like this. I completed the first outline with a backwards-split-stitch, then filled in the rhinophores of the blue dragon with a satin stitch, followed by the fins.

Somewhere in between every workshop member got a large bottle of water and they set up more fans to try and combat the heat of the day.

Afterwards I repeated the same process on the brown dragon, with the outline coming first, followed by the back spikes, the horns, then the tail fluff. Both their eyes were the last part I embroidered, going in an inwards circle.

Did it look how I had intended to in the end? No, but this was also my first time doing embroidery at all so I was still quite happy with the result.

Once the motif was finished they showed me how to apply it to the back of a notebook I had chosen before (big size, blank pages). There was a lot of glue involved and a specific folding technique and by the end I was holding my own embroidered notebook. One of a kind!

Where to book the embroidery workshop in Hoi An?

You can book the embroidery workshop via their Instagram account @hop.handi, or just walk in and ask about it, but if you do that there might not be availability on that day, so I recommend messaging them first.