DISCOVER PROJECT

Dziewięćsił

Back to the flower

The dziewięćsił — the carline thistle — is the most recognizable Podhale motif alongside the parzenica, the scrollwork on highlander trousers. Some people treat it as the only truly traditional, authentic motif a woman's bodice can carry. Which is exactly why I wanted to take it on and do something with it. With traditional folk motifs this is how it tends to go over the years: they stop being drawn fresh from the source, from nature, and start getting traced off someone else's earlier pattern — a copy of a copy. I wanted to pull it half a step back toward the living flower. Not because that's better, but because it needs doing, and to show it can be done differently too. If we only reproduce instead of create, in the end we won't have a living tradition — we'll have an open-air museum. Our regional patterns didn't fall from the sky; someone, once, also made something new, something other than what came before. And anyway — try photocopying a copy of a copy of a printout, and see where that gets you.

SCOPE Motif design, Embroidery February 2026

It's easy to make a new motif nobody knows. With a known, traditional one it's the other way round — and that's exactly why I reached for it. If the dziewięćsił, the one you see at every turn, can be seen once more in a different way, then there's something to that direction. There's a streak of contrariness in it too, because after years in this world I know how easily you can rub the self-appointed sheriffs of tradition — the folklore police — the wrong way. People often sit in their bubbles and take one pattern, one direction, for the real tradition. The catch with folklore is that two villages over they think exactly the same — about completely different motifs.

One thing happens to a motif handed down over the years: it stops being drawn from nature and starts being traced off someone else's earlier pattern. With the dziewięćsił there's the sequin and the bead on top of that — pretty, and squarely within the canon of traditional costume — but the sequins themselves push the motif toward geometry, because a grid of beads and rhinestones leaves little room for shading or curve. The flower becomes an even star. There's nothing wrong with that; it's living craft too, and this geometric turn runs through folk art in Podhale and in other regions alike. Still, I get the feeling that what's lost is the very thing it all began with — looking at the living plant. The main element of the motif no longer resembles its source.

This is how the dziewięćsił most often looks today: beads and sequins laid out in an even, radiating star. Fine work and real craft — but by now the motif has been reduced to a symbol. That's exactly why it matters to me to make traditional patterns, just along a slightly different road. Instead of paring tradition down and confining it to a handful of symbols — to grow it. Because that's where it came from in the first place: from imagination, from curiosity. From góralska śleboda — the highlanders' freedom.

Not better. Different.

On this bodice I pulled it half a step back toward the flower. Not to botanical accuracy — it's still meant to be a motif, not an illustration. But thread instead of beads: the angle the stitches are set at builds a texture that catches the light; the shading on the white petals is actually three tones, not obvious at first glance but enough to give depth, so the petals have direction and volume; gold thread to add a little shine and lift the flower itself; a raised centre. Just enough nature to win back its character and bring it closer to the source it grew from — without turning it into a plate out of a herbarium.

Bodice pattern created for Folk Club, to my own concept.

Faithful not to a particular pattern but to the method: look at what grows, and read it your own way.