I’m quite sure that most of you don’t know yet that I have started my long holidays in Kurdistan. It will not be easy to find this location on the map. Kurdistan is located on the Northern part of Iraq and it has vanished from the world map in 1916 based on Franco – British agreement in Sykes-Picot. Kurdish are biggest nation without country in the modern world and counts almost 40 mln people.

Original Kurdistan got split between Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

We are visiting Iraqi part which has the most of freedom and autonomy. Beautiful flag demonstrate in red colour blood of Peshmarga who fought for freedom, white is a piece which was achieved and green with sun  in the middle represents celebration of Nawroz on the first day of spring in Kurdistan.

Enough of history. My Kurdish family is fantastic, very open, warm and welcoming. They all want to learn English and helping me to learn Kurdish (Sorani dialect). We have lots of laughter during those “lessons”.

My favourite tradition is tea time right after each meal. Tea is always strong, hot and very sweet. At the same time everybody snack sunflower seeds fried with salt. When we go back to Canada I’m going to start new Saturday tradition for our afternoon tea time.

Now I’m going to take you from sweet tea time to the fabric store. Fabrics are so much different here than in Canada. You can find so many amazing patterns, colours and designs. I would love to buy almost everything! It obviously brings lots of ideas on how to connect modern fashion of Western World with sparkly and colourful fabrics of Middle East. Fusion which comes out of it maybe very surprising.Kurdish clothes as they are in the shape and design looks beautiful but I think can be recognized as folklore clothing only. Women and girls wear it only for special occasions however I could see mean wearing traditional pants on daily basis. Imagine how could we change and transform this style and type of fabric to create new trend in fashion or new line of clothing.

OK lets go back to my favourite section which is clothes for kids. Looking at Disney style and all those sparkly princess dresses I’m quite sure we can easily incorporate parts of shiny fabrics in to daily clothes. I’m planing to show you some simple designs very soon.