When Khaled Nabhan held his granddaughter Reem's body in November 2023, he called her 'Rooh al-Rooh,' soul of the soul, in a video that traveled far past Gaza and reached people who had never otherwise heard her name. As a mother, I felt that sentiment immediately. My own daughter is the soul of my soul too, and she's learned some tatreez alongside me these past months. I know what it means to measure a day by whether a child is fed, safe, and within reach. That knowledge moves the needle through every piece in this series.

Doilies occupy a particular, often dismissed, place in domestic craft: decorative, feminine, associated with grandmothers and good china, rarely taken seriously. The series uses doilies and embroidery, a domestic object and women's craft,  as a site of political meaning. Each doily combines Tatreez (Palestinian embroidery) patterns with the embroidered name of a child killed in the genocide in Gaza. This series claims that space deliberately. 

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Placing a child's name on an object historically reserved for tea tables and side tables is intentional. These are the objects of ordinary domestic life, the surfaces we don't think twice about, and I wanted these names to live there too, quietly present in daily life rather than confined to news cycles that move on. This is a small, obsessive, and painstaking form of naming and remembering, one child at a time, in thread, by hand.

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The ten children memorialized so far are listed below. Their stories can be found in the description of each doily's image. This is a continuing series and I will keep adding doilies with children's names to it.

• Dunia Abu Mohsen, 12, Khan Younis.

• Bayan Mohammed Hamdan Totah, 10, Gaza governorate.

• Muhammad Jamil Moeen Atallah, 10, Gaza Strip.

• Sidra and Suzan Hassouna, twin sisters, 7, Rafah.

• Omar Bilal al-Banna, 4, Gaza City.

• Saba and Sana Abdullah Abu Saif, twin sisters, 4, Gaza City.

• Tariq Ali Badwan, 5, and his sister, Reem Ali Badwan, 3, Deir al-Balah area.

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