Publishing a Legacy and Stitching for Palestine

A sneak peek at my sketch for the embroidery book I'm making

I have always wanted to do something to help Palestinian families. I started last December, during a year when I was in the middle of raising my 1-year-old, my second daughter. Sales were not coming in because my mind was too focused on being a mom. I also wanted something more than 3D flowers. I wanted to improve my artistry as well.

So I started a new project after hearing about the death of Khaled, one year after his grandchildren died. The soul of his soul. I wanted to memorialize them. As a mother of two, I could imagine myself and how it would feel to tragically lose my children. I cried when I heard Khaled was killed, a year after Reem. How he spent his last year looking after the other children and the cats among the rubble.

I started the work, unsure how to make skin tones, but somehow I muddled through and it looks good. I got to Reem's yellow dress, and it also ended up looking good. I started on her skirt, but by this time it was April 2025, and then my recently turned 2-year-old turned up the toddler to 110%, and I have been frazzled ever since.

Every time I go to the home office, the piece is there on my desk, waiting for me to finish it. A year after Khaled passed, and two after Reem and her brother Tariq were killed, I feel a sense of guilt, needing to look after my children first before finishing an important piece.Now it is December 2025, and my goal has been postponed to 2026. But I thought there has to be a way to help. I want to still help raise money for the families that are still there and surviving.

I found an embroidery book on Amazon. It looked mass-produced. It was a book with fabric pages made for stitching directly on top of, with over 80 stitches to practice with. Perfect for teaching others how to embroider and also how to help save money for those in need at the same time.I started making videos on TikTok, and in 7 days I had already made $16 from commissions. It was working!

Until I found out the book was pirated from another embroidery shop. I sat there, on my bed in the dark, thinking of the ramifications of what I had done. Sure, I had raised money to help those in dire need, but I unknowingly used a copyright-infringed book and asked others to buy it to help raise the money.

I thought it best to sleep on it and help settle the matter when I had a clearer mind that was well-rested. The next day, I was still thinking it over. It didn't help that my kids woke me up at 5:30 by poking my cheek. It was also a Saturday, so I couldn't really think about work. I felt it would be better to send an apology to the author, Amy McClellan, and explain what I had done and how I would like to fix it. She no longer sold the book in her shop. I asked if she would put the book back in her shop, I would ask others to buy her book instead without me earning commissions.

I haven't heard back from her.

I thought, what if I tried to make an embroidery book with essential stitches for embroidery? Of course, not her book. I'm not a pirate. It'll have my own samples in an order that makes sense. I quickly sketched out five pages. One cover page and four practice pages. I started out with lines and borders, becoming slightly more difficult. Then I moved onto filling stitches from the basic satin stitch to the long and short stitch.

At the end, I'll put in some simple images to help make the stitches learned have a function. That way, I'm not earning $2 per commission. I would be using the proceeds to help raise money, and the rest is used to buy the materials for the book. I would continue to make the lesson videos and put the book I made in my shop.

And so that's what I'll do. I think it will be successful. It already has been on my TikTok pages. But this time I'm going to do it the right way, without pirating.