Posted in the Winter/Spring 2024 Issue of Carolina Spark
By Kristin D'Agostino
When leaving the Ukraine in June 2022 with her 10-year-old son, A-B Tech student Nataliia Chorna, 42, had to carefully choose what to pack. “We could only take one bag on the plane,” Chorna says, “Another would have cost $300.” Among the carefully chosen objects was a dress her grandmother lovingly hand-embroidered back in 2014. A deep silky purple, embroidered with tea-colored roses, the dress now hangs in Chorna’s West Asheville home, a reminder of a long-held dream: After a year-and-a-half of challenges and transition, Chorna, a fashion designer by trade, stands poised to launch her own business embroidering women’s clothing and bags.
Traditional folk embroidery has been found on Ukrainian clothing excavated from cities dating back to the First Century. Chorna’s grandmother Svetlana taught her how to machine embroider at age six. “She looked like Scarlet O’Hara,” Chorna recalls. “She wore beautiful dresses. And she sang Ukrainian songs on the radio; her voice is a rare soprano.”
Chorna quickly went from sewing doll clothes to embroidering stars and cross designs. In ancient Ukrainian folk culture, every symbol had a meaning and each was believed to protect the wearer from harm, to bring happiness, love, or fertility. The cross design signified protection and success; flowers, prosperity; the star, harmony. “Today traditionally Ukrainians wear embroidered clothes on important days like wedding days, anniversaries, and christenings,” Chorna says. “In ancient times, a girl would give an embroidered shirt to a boy. It would take about a year to make by hand.”
During high school, Chorna made clothing for herself and her friends, adapting store-bought skirts to custom fit. After graduating, she went on to study fashion design and construction in Kyiv at the University of Technology and Design. By the time she was 30, Chorna had met her engineer husband Maksym and had her first child. She juggled motherhood along with accounting work for her husband’s business and soon began a clothing design business of her own. Her niche was affordable dresses for dancers with nonstandard figures. Chorna continued to do this for twelve years, though she says it lacked both creative and financial fulfillment. The dresses were all similar and the money fell short. For fun, she began making and machine-embroidering over-the-shoulder cotton tote bags with traditional Ukrainian designs. “Everyone needs bags,” she says, “It was something useful and also creative… I like cross-stitching very much.”
When the Russians bombed Kyiv in February of 2022, Chorna had to leave her business behind. While Maksym stayed, hoping to join the war effort, Chorna fled the country with Slava, ultimately landing in a refugee shelter in Slovakia, where she found a job at an IKEA factory. It was a difficult life working for low wages and Chorna, who is fluent in English, hoped for more. In May, she posted an ad on Facebook seeking sponsorship in the United States and a woman from Fletcher, North Carolina answered. Chorna and Slava moved to America just two weeks later. Maksym joined them last December and is presently working as an engineer technician. These days, Slava, now 12, is settled at Rainbow Community School. Her oldest, Bodhan, is attending college in Germany. After studying English at A-B Tech, Chorna was offered a part-time job as a “greeter” in the Transitional Studies department, where she now helps international students, including the college’s large Ukrainian population, navigate classes and registration.
Nearly finished with her accounting certificate, Chorna can finally focus on feeding her creativity. She hopes to work as an accountant while launching her embroidery business online and at local farmers’ markets. In the meantime, she’s fast building a solid reputation as a designer. Thanks to her sponsor, she found work assisting local fashion designer Gigi Fasano at her Lexington Avenue shop B. Nomad, where she created jackets, pants, and pillowcases in natural fabrics like silk and cotton.
“She can do anything,” Fasano says. “Her work is impeccable, and she goes the extra mile with everything she does.”
Lauran Holt, an English Language teacher at A-B Tech, was gifted one of Chorna’s bags last Christmas after having her as a student. “It is the colors of the Ukrainian flag,” Holt says. “I love that bag. It’s sturdy and the seams are clean. I feel like I could own it for the rest of my life.”
Since then, Chorna has created a collection of colorful hand-embroidered bags which she is selling on Etsy. It’s not been easy, however, to find a local factory willing and able to machine cross-stitch her designs. Luckily, she soon won’t have to grapple with local factories. She’s recently acquired an industrial embroidery machine of her own, which she will soon set up in a backyard studio space she’ll share with her landlord. Having a large machine of her own will also enable her to do clothing with more expansive cross-stitch designs.
In the future, Chorna hopes to have a shop and a factory of her own. For now, she’s content to work when energy, time, and space allow at a sewing machine set up by a window at home. Because her cozy apartment lacks a closet, the dress her grandmother embroidered hangs on a hook on the wall. Chorna saves it for special occasions like Christmas or Vyshyvanka Day, a holiday on May 16, when Ukrainians wear traditional embroidered blouses and clothes. These designs are important, Chorna said, because this type of clothing was taken away by the Russian regime during WWII and women were forced to wear plain dark dresses. “They sent the men to Siberia and made the women work the men’s jobs. They tried to take away our identity,” Chorna says. Since the start of the war, many Ukrainians have turned to traditional embroidery as a sign of defiance, and vyshyvankas, or embroidered blouses are worn to show national pride.
Since she fled her home country, Chorna has talked to her grandmother, 88, on the phone every two weeks. Although her small village in central Ukraine is occasionally bombed, Svetlana has chosen to remain rather than start over elsewhere. As time passes, the dress she embroidered so many years ago takes on a new deeper meaning.
“Every time I see it, I feel warm,” Chorna says, her hazel eyes tearing. “I think of home.”
To find Chorna’s work visit UKIETREND.