Fabric Shopping with Heba and Hana

As the American intern working this semester to improve media outreach for the Fostering Women Entrepreneurs in Nablus (FWEN) program, I have jumped at every opportunity to get to know the budding businesswomen in this program and learn more about their projects. A few weeks ago, I had the chance to go fabric shopping in downtown Nablus with Heba and Hana, the entrepreneurs behind "H2 Fashion."

These two women make beautiful clothing and accessories using traditional Palestinian embroidery techniques that they learned in school. Because I'd seen many of their samples, I was excited to see where the raw materials come from. I followed Heba and Hana through several fabric stores in the crowded downtown shopping area of Nablus as they picked out beautiful colored thread and other embellishments.

When that was done, the women continued to several home furnishing stores, where they were looking for the perfect set of matching white towels of assorted sizes, which they would embroider as a sample project. The women bargained hard and weren't afraid to press salesmen for the information they needed. By the end of the trip, they'd found all the supplies they needed to produce another set of "H2 Fashion" creations.