Palestinian embroidery

One thing I noticed especially during my trip to Palestine was the beautiful embroidery that women sport on their traditional gowns, especially the older women that I saw in Jerusalem. Of course most of the tourist shops sell cushion covers, blankets, iPhone holders, pencil cases and pretty much everything else you could somehow embroider but I actually found it one of the more interesting souvenirs.

Since I'm interested in textiles, handicraft and textile design I was searching the internet to find those traditional patterns which are usually worked in cross-stitch and contain mainly geometric or natural shapes such as flowers, trees or leaves. I was even looking around shops if you could get a "DIY Palestinian cross-stitch set" with the pattern and the yarn but this doesn't seem to have a lot of demand. Maybe a good business idea? The Palestinians sure don't lack a sense for that!

Here are some of the sample patterns I found online:

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/42957090@N06/7926022786/

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ramallah_woman_15029v.jpg

Source: http://www.photographium.com/woman-in-embroidered-costume-ramallah-palestine-1898-1914

 And this is a website which had a very good overview of charts (well, basically the only one I found):
http://palestinianembroider.tripod.com/traditional.htm


 I'm seriously thinking about ordering some of the books as the internet does not have many ready-to-use patterns.