Not long ago I received an amazing gift from my Mom. When I took the package in my hands, I realized that it was something unusual. Opening it, I was amazed. It was an embroidered linen towel with which my Mother met me and my husband on our wedding day. Almost 30 years have passed since that day. My Grandmother gave this towel to my Mother. It remembers being touched by several generations of women in our family. Here I have it. Friends, this is a trembling feeling…

I do not know who of my great-great-grandmothers created this beauty with her own hands, but I know that for me this thing is very important today. It was fully created by women of my family.

From the second half of May to the beginning of June, when the cuckoo began to cuckoo, and the earth was warmed up and generously watered with spring moisture, Russia began to sow flax.

Flax does not require much care: it was enough to weed it on time. But if you imagine hectares of blue flowers, generously dotted with weeds, it does not sound great. I do not think that men took an active part in this process, so we can only envy the endurance of our women.

In early September, they began to gather flax, light yellow stems were pulled with their roots and tied in small sheaves and placed on the field to dry.

At the next stage after drying, the seeds were collected and upholstered. This was done with chichigas, special canes, thickened at the end, right on the field.

Then the sheaves were soaked, were placed in water, pressed with a reliable yoke (poles, logs) and left to soak. This process lasted from a week to a month, depending on the weather.

Then flax was crushed, ruffled and scratched with the help of simple tools. The process took place in cold weather, but despite this, one woman could handle up to two pounds of stems per a day.

Combing was entrusted to a mother of the family or an experienced artisan. Depending on the amount of combing, fibre was separated for different purposes, from coarse cloth-rows to the finest threads for towels. Flax was only those fibres that remained on the crest after a long repeated combing.

By the end of autumn, women showed each other the first flax. Girls tried to brag this skill especially, after all on "bride-show" there could be their future mothers-in-law.

Girls in Russia from five years old began to learn to spin threads from flax, at the age of fourteen a girl already knew how to weave these threads in a cloth, to embroider and prepare a dowry. The history tells that girls from rich peasant families could have more than a hundred towels in their dowry.

A skilled embroiderer was considered an ideal bride. A bride gave the most elegant towels to her new relatives and honoured guests at the wedding. Towels were worn as belts by both bride and groom, a towel was considered a symbol of the way to a new stage of life, and one towel was wrapped around their joined hands.

The shape and colour of the embroidery were essential elements of a towel. Certain motifs and stitches were repeated and again, and embroidery was almost always performed in red — a colour of great importance to all Slavic peoples, associated with life and fertile principles, and stitches were made so skilfully that the embroidery on the back of the towels is not distinguishable from embroidery in the front.

Ceremonial towel can be found not only in Russia, but also throughout Eastern Europe, as well as in Finland and Estonia.

Motifs on Russian towels usually have a geometric pattern. Embroidery on Ukrainian towels is characterized by embroidered drawings of birds, flowers or grapes on vine, as well as drawing may include the date of work and initials of the artisan.

Belarusian artisans preferred to decorate their creations with colours and geometric patterns, often using blue or black thread along with a noticeable red and white colour scheme. Russian towels usually had embroidered patterns made at each end, and the middle part of the towel remained untouched, while Ukrainian towels were embroidered along the entire length. The ends of the towel were usually trimmed with red ribbon or strips of calico, or lace of unbleached linen thread.

Polotentse (lit. towel) in Russian, ruchnik (lit. towel) in Belarusian, and rushnik (lit. towel) in Ukrainian. For hundreds of years, this type of textile had, has and will have special meaning on the whole territory of European Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.