One of the most widespread and accessible forms of Ukrainian folk art is embroidery. In Ukrainian folk embroidery, while there are common features present in all regions of Ukraine, local differences clearly emerge, logically justified by geographical, historical, and social factors.The life of the people in a particular environment, their everyday life, customs, nature, work skills, and criteria for understanding beauty have led to distinct principles in individual centers, districts, and villages. Our focus is on the local features of the embroidery art of Hutsulshchyna and Pokuttya.
In the embroidery of the Carpathian group of this orthographic category, such as the Hutsuls, archaic features of folk ornamentation have been preserved. Numerous historical, folkloric, and literary materials affirm the widespread use of clothing embroidery in Hutsulshchyna.
Particularly famous were the embroidered shirts from Kosiv, the villages of Richka, Pistin, Kosmach, and Verkhovyna. Each of these settlements had its own artistic stylistic features of the folk embroidered shirt, tablecloth, towel, and napkin.
Of course, Hutsul embroidery developed within the unified stream of Western Ukrainian embroidery art based on ancient Rus' art, influenced by specific local factors, which distinguished it as a separate clearly expressed local phenomenon. One can speak of the deep artistic traditions of Hutsul clothing embroidery based on many samples of embroidery from the late 18th to early 19th centuries, which are preserved in museums of Ukraine, particularly in the Kolomyia Museum of Folk Art of Hutsulshchyna and Pokuttya.
The collection of samples of embroidered shirts, headscarves, etc., testifies to the high artistic level of the ornamental embroidery art of the Hutsuls.
Over the years, the collective genius of folk craftsmen crystallized a clear artistic system in which the factors of material, techniques, ornamentation, composition, and color interacted with each other.
In Hutsulshchyna, just as in all other regions of Ukraine, embroidery adorned certain parts of clothing details. These included women's, men's, and children's shirts, headwear (headscarves, shawls), outerwear (kaptars, serdaks, baibarakas, kozhukhs, mantles, gugl), and waist garments (hachi, portyanytsia, kapchuri, kaptsi, onuchi).
The properties of linen and wool fabrics, cloth, and leather used for sewing clothes determined the character and structure of the materials used for embroidery.
The main materials for embroidery are hand-spun linen and wool threads, twisted wool threads (“kotsyk”), twisted braided cords, silk, metal, silver, and gold threads, mouliné, beads, lelitki, sapyan ribbons, buttons, corals, heads of metal nails (bobryky), and capsules. The fur of foxes, ferrets, and martens is used as appliqué. Since the mid-19th century, factory threads such as volichka, zapolokh began to be used more frequently for embroidery, and from the early 20th century – DMC threads, mouliné, beads, and silk. Bead embroidery is widespread in areas bordering the mountainous Bukovina.
