Why this shop exists

I'm a Brazilian embroiderer, and I'm Black. Like most Black Brazilians, I descend from people who were brought here by force, and I have no way of tracing which people, from which part of Africa, or when. The records that would answer that were mostly never kept, or were destroyed. That absence is common to millions of families here — it isn't a personal misfortune so much as a shared condition.

Adinkra symbols come from the Akan people of what is now Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. People from that region were among those brought to Brazil, alongside — in far greater numbers, by most historical accounts — people from Central Africa and from the Yoruba-speaking regions of what is now Nigeria and Benin. I can't tell you Adinkra is "my" heritage in any provable sense. I can tell you it's a real, documented, living tradition, and that working with it carefully is one way of standing closer to a history that was taken from people like me in general, even when it can't be traced back to any one of us in particular.

That's why the sourcing on this site isn't decoration. Every symbol here is checked against two independent sources before it goes up — not one blog post repeated by ten other blog posts. Every design is measured, not estimated: stitch count, cut count, runtime, all read from the file itself. I'd rather publish a symbol slower and get the name, the origin, and the shape right than publish it fast and get it wrong.

Where this is going

Adinkra is the first collection because it's the one I could research and verify properly first. It won't be the only one. I study Kabbalah, and separately, astrology — which is part of why the Hebrew alphabet and the zodiac glyphs are next on the list, not as an unrelated add-on but as the same project applied to two more symbol systems I already spend time with. The throughline across all three is the same rule: describe what a tradition actually says, credit where it comes from, and never claim a symbol does something it doesn't.

If you've made it this far — thank you for reading past the product page.