Ethiopian day

Today is multicultural day at my daughters’ school. They’re going dressed in their hand embroidered Ethiopian clothes. Hopefully I’ve had a chance to add a photo to this post for you.

I would have written more, but I spent so much time plaiting their hair last night (1 hour each) and making the injera (another hour) that I ran out of time to do anything on the Mountmellick embroidery stitch along. The injera has turned out nothing like real injera, but quite frankly how many of their classmates will have tried the real thing and know it well enough to compare?!

Their clothes feature traditional Ethiopian embroidered crosses. These are based on the motifs of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. Much of Ethiopian embroidery features such crosses, usually worked mostly in chain stitch, in wool, on hand-woven cotton fabric. Colours can range from bright and cheery, to darker and more subdued. I’m not sure what is traditional and what is more to do with tourist tastes. Certainly colourschemes featuring Ethiopian national colours (red, yellow, green) would be traditional, as they are very proud of their colours.

Ethiopian colours are found everywhere in Addis. One day on the way across town in a taxi, I decided to note all the places that I saw them. They were used in stripes on power poles, in on food sacks, on clothing, shop fronts…

The girls’ outfits are in two different colour schemes. Elder daughter has bright blue, black and a tan brown colour. Younger daughter has black, red and white. We have been blessed by a reasonably warm day, so hopefully neither of them freeze.

Younger daughter is so excited by the plaits I put in her hair. They’re not real corn rows as they would have in Ethiopia, but then neither of our girls have the tight curls of Ethiopian hair either! If they’re comfortable, I think she plans to keep them in for a few days. We’ll see how comfortable she finds them! Elder daughter liked them too, but was so tired by the time I finished that she just wanted to go to bed!

I hope they have a wonderful day proudly showing off their Ethiopian-ness!