Alex Casey talks to the women behind 51 Threads, a community art project helping those affected by the Christchurch mosque attacks.
In the weeks before March 15, 2019, Noraini Abbas Milne had begun wearing a white telekung, or prayer garment, when she attended the Al-Noor Mosque in Christchurch. “In the masjid, you will always see donated prayer garments and proper dress for people to wear,” she explains. “I liked this one.” Embroidered with a delicate floral pattern around scalloped edges, the borrowed telekung was still being worn by Abbas Milne when she fled the mosque during the terror attack that claimed 51 Muslim lives, including her own football-loving 14-year-old son, Sayyad.
Although she still doesn’t know who the telekung belonged to, the garment has taken on a new life, six years later. Hand-stitched by Abbas Milne in honour of her son, it now quotes a verse from the Quran that calmed her following New Zealand’s darkest day: “Never think of those martyred in the cause of Allah as dead,” it reads in Arabic. “In truth, they are alive with their Lord and well provided for.” Having hung on gallery walls and in civic halls, the piece is just one of dozens created for 51 Threads Connection, an embroidery project helping to heal those affected by the attacks.
The origins of the project trace back to 2022, when Abbas Milne founded the community organisation Sow a Lyttel Seed alongside Lyttelton local Cathy Lum-Webb. “For me, being the only Muslim family in a small community, it was about giving back to the people in Lyttelton who supported me,” says Abbas Milne. The Sow a Lyttel Seed Facebook page launched on February 7 2022 – Sayyad’s birthday. Soon hosting local planting events, volleyball games and futsal competitions, the kaupapa of the group is simple: “healing hearts, growing together”.
It was a year later that Abbas Milne had the idea for 51 Threads. “Sayyad always wanted to be a professional football player and, of course, I can’t do that,” she laughs. “But I still wanted to honour his legacy with the things that I can do, and embroidery is my favorite – even though I haven’t done it a lot.” Through the wider Christchurch Muslim community, she was soon connected with Philippa Dye, who was taught embroidery by her grandmother at the age of four, and jumped at the opportunity to help those in the community pick up a needle and thread.
To keep things simple and the overall look cohesive, they made handy kits with a limited colour palette: white cloth to represent purity, blue thread to represent the vivid tiles on many overseas mosques, green thread to represent the dome over the prophet’s tomb, and a sunny yellow thread because it was Sayyad’s favourite colour. Dye even managed to get a “massive discount” on supplies from Lynncraft in Bush Inn. “I got talking to the manager about it and he said ‘give me a minute’, rang his big boss, and that was it,” she smiles.
The first community event was held in the Lyttelton community space as a part of Unity Week in 2024. “March 15 should not be forgotten, so we asked everyone to go back to that day and choose a word to reflect upon,” says Abbas Milne. Local calligraphy expert Sudi Dargipour, who also created the Sow a Lyttel Seed logo, then translated the word into Arabic and traced it on their cloth as a guide. Words selected included hope, peace, faith, kindness, and energy. One woman chose “silent tears” and embroidered the phrase on a handkerchief.
Participants were able to take their pieces home to continue working on, but they were also invited to meet up periodically with the Sow a Lyttel Seed team on hand to help. “So many of the people who were doing them had never picked up a needle before, so we wanted to give them everything they needed,” explains Dye. “I love the range of skill and emotion that is there Some of them were very raw, and I needed to do quite a lot of work on the back of them to make them tidy. But that’s fine, because they came from the heart.”
While also learning a new craft, the gentle focus required during embroidering also had a therapeutic effect. “It was relaxing doing it,” one participant described, “you feel like you are doing a meditation and just concentrating on the work without thinking of anything else.” Dye chose the word “unity” for her piece. “I was really focusing on where we are as a country, how amazing it was when we all stepped up afterwards and what we can learn from this,” she says. For Abbas Milne, it was “a healing journey” to embroider the telekung she wore that day.
“It definitely helped.” she says. “Some of the projects we have done for other people, but this one really was for me.”
Since the works were finished and mounted, they’ve been displayed in Ōtautahi multiple times and travelled up to Tāmaki Makaurau last year. Next week, Abbas Milne’s telekung will be a part of the upcoming exhibition PUPURITIA: Storytelling and Contemporary Textiles at Objectspace in central Auckland. They are getting requests everywhere from Palmerston North to Alexandra, and having their sights set on securing more funding to take the collection overseas to connect with affected families that have since left Ōtautahi in their grief.
It has also organically become a space for people to reflect on those they have lost throughout their lives. “Everybody who comes to the exhibition, they have their own reason why,” says Abbas Milne. When 51 Threads visited Moteuka at the end of last year, Lum-Webb recalls a woman who told them, quietly, that she was there to grieve the recent passing of her son. “She said the space was somewhere she could feel safe with everyone, because that was her personal grieving, losing someone in her own life,” she says. “That really opened up a whole new level of conversation and this sense of people being together.”
Dye agrees that the project has forged a deeper sense of connection for her – particularly with the women that she has become close friends with as a result of lending her stitching skills. “This is creating something beautiful out of something that was very, very ugly,” she says. The next phrase she is stitching is a translation of “sisterhood” in Arabic. “It’s done a huge service, particularly for women, to get that sense of sisterhood back,” she says. “Nowadays we’re all so busy, always stuck on our phones, and we don’t even meet our neighbours. People need to be more curious about each other, you know?
“Go out and ask questions, and you’ll realise how much we all have in common.”
