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Enjoy a personal guide to the art of paj ntaub in Hmong Museum’s monthly free workshops. Send me exclusive offers, unique gift ideas, and personalized tips for shopping and selling on Etsy. Etsy is no longer supporting older versions of your web browser in order to ensure that user data remains secure. The project was made possible through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Asian Pacific Endowment of the Saint Paul Foundation.
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They dress up in their best embroidery clothes to be seen in public with friends, and engage in courtship with boys through ball tossing and folk song singing activities. According to Shoua V. Xiong (2012), consultant of the Hmong Embroidery project, when a girl gets married, she is responsible for sewing clothes for everyday wear as well as new clothes prior to the Hmong New Year celebration for her family. On New Year’s Day, a Hmong family wears their new clothes to celebrate the festivities. The website is intended to educate viewers about the many different types of traditional and modern Hmong embroidery and the meanings attached to many of the motifs commonly used in Hmong embroidered art works. The art works featured in the exhibits on the website are part of the collections of the Hmong Cultural Center and the Hmong Archives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The only time she had to sew were late nights or during the limited breaks she could find between her other responsibilities.
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Some men became artists who drew the stories, while others learned to sew story cloths as well. Folktales are popular embroidered stories including the Hmong creation story, Nou Nplai and Yer; the birth of Jesus Christ; and many others. According to oral history in the Hmong community, it is said the Hmong women hid the ancient Hmong paj ntaub script in the clothing of the Hmong people, especially in the pleated skirts of the Green Hmong. From this time forward, the scripts became motifs or symbols in Hmong embroidery. Knowledge of the scripts was not so relevant in the lives of the Hmong and was eventually lost.
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These traded goods held within their folds the profound memories and narratives of the Hmong’s experiences of war, refuge, and hardship. Hmong embroidery has evolved to include Lao, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Western influences with the availability of different kinds of fabrics, threads, methods, techniques, and ideas. For instance, when the Hmong first arrived in the United States in the late 1970s, some of the families were initially resettled in Pennsylvania. While residing there, Hmong women learned a new style of appliqué techniques (quilting) from the Amish community. Once the hemp plant is harvested and dried out in the sun, the fibers are stripped from the plant’s stalk.
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To counter the patchy and broken history of the Hmong culture lost without a written language, Hmong refugees created what are called story cloths in order to record and express the rich, devastating, and expansive history and culture of the Hmong people. These Story Cloths brought change in textile styles, ranging several square feet. The Hmong incorporated symbols and figures in their cloths which represented specific events, people, and history in narrative form.
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A story cloth is a flat piece of cloth with stitching that depicts a theme and often has a geometric border around it. The overall shapes of the story cloths are primarily rectangles or squares. Story cloths are pictorial because they represent Hmong figures, animals, places, and shapes that tell a story with pictures. The most well-known form of modern Hmong embroidery is the story cloth. There are distinctive characteristics of clothing within the five groups of Hmong people.
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These oversize squares were transformed into tablecloths, pillowcases, and wall decorations. They also inspired household and accessory items including cup coasters, aprons, bags, jewelry, and stuffed animals. The methods and techniques utilized for making Hmong clothes have changed over time.
Hemp Cloth
As the Hmong continue to live in the United States, their lifestyles have changed due to employment and educational opportunities. Hmong women don’t have the time to make embroidery as they once did in Laos. It is more convenient to purchase machine-made Hmong attire at the flea market or the supermarket. There are many new styles of Hmong attire, which do not resemble the regional Hmong clothes from the provinces of Laos. At the present time, many Hmong girls don’t have the time and/or opportunity to learn how to make paj ntaub as their elders once did.
Story Cloth
Shoua V. Xiong of Hmong ABC Bookstore served as a consultant, and answered questions and clarified things that were unclear. Mark E. Pfeifer, PhD served as a grantwriter to find funding for the project and also edited the final narratives. We are grateful to Noah Vang for allowing the Hmong Cultural Center and the Hmong Archives to use numerous photographs he provided for the website.

Next, the fibers are pounded to soften them, and then the women hand-twisted them into long threads to be woven into coarse cloths. In peaceful times, the New Year celebration was a special event for everyone to dress up in their finest embroidered clothes to be seen by the public. The celebration was a time for courtship and a place to attract marriage partners. Young brides would spend time making new clothes for everyday wear and New Year celebration clothes, because it is believed that new clothes bring good luck, good health, and prosperity to the family. Furthermore, most girls sew their own clothes for the Hmong New Year’s celebration.
Cotton and synthetic fabrics are now preferred over hemp as the latter is heavy and difficult to find. In the past, paj ntaub served as a form of decoration for Hmong women to create clothes and preserve history. In the present, paj ntaub has undergone tremendous changes as designs and patterns get repurposed or reimagined to meet the creative demand of modernization where group identity is less important. The emphasis is on creative expression to see who can wear the most unique styles that come from different groups’ clothing (Laotian, Thai, Chinese, American) and mixing it with Hmong paj ntaub motifs. Other challenges like assimilation (people internalizing dominant culture’s values, behaviors, and beliefs as their own) present obstacles for paj ntaub to exist in its authentic form. The ease of access to machinery and cheap machine-made prints threatens the survival of paj ntaub.
Although scholarship is limited in terms of Hmong basketry, examples can often be seen on display in folk art museums or depicted in Hmong story cloths. From Hmong oral history, it was said that Hmong women once preserved the ancient Hmong writing script in their clothing when the imperial Chinese persecution of the Hmong increased in the 1700s to 1800s. The imperial government banned the use of the Hmong language to force the Hmong people to assimilate.