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Stitching Chiapas into Halifax
Rubi works slowly and with intention. That is not a style choice — it is what the craft demands. Hand embroidery cannot be rushed without showing it, and she has no interest in hiding the process. The handmade quality is the point.
She has been making things with her hands for as long as she can remember. Art, embroidery, photography, music, design — these aren't separate hobbies but different expressions of the same need to create. Even during the years in Halifax when she was working full hours in other jobs, she stayed connected to making. She couldn't not.
What she is building with Majtan Artisans is personal in a way that is hard to separate from the work itself. She chooses colors and symbols that carry specific cultural meaning. She uses stitches tied to particular traditions and regions. She makes each piece by hand, which means each one takes real time from her actual life. She is aware of that, and it shapes how she thinks about the person who ends up with the piece — as someone receiving something that has her attention genuinely inside it.
She is still becoming fluent in this city. Still finding her place in it. Majtan Artisans is part of how she does that: by bringing what she knows into a new place, one embroidered piece at a time.
Stitched from memory, made to travel
The pieces people reach for first
The concha is a Mexican sweet bread — soft, dome-shaped, with a patterned sugar crust — found in neighborhood bakeries across Mexico. For anyone who grew up with them, the shape carries a specific kind of memory: the smell of a panadería in the morning, coffee at a kitchen table, a particular version of home that is hard to describe to someone who wasn't there.
Rubi's hand-embroidered concha keychains borrow that shape and make it something you can carry. For members of the Latin community in Halifax, the reaction is often immediate. They smile before they can explain why.
She says she loves watching that moment. The recognition before the words arrive.
Each piece is made using embroidery techniques and visual languages drawn from the textile traditions of southern Mexico, particularly Chiapas. The colors are not decorative choices — they carry cultural meaning tied to the symbols and histories of specific regions. The handmade process is visible in the work, intentionally so.
Rubi spent years before coming to Canada working alongside Tseltal artisans in Chiapas, preserving these techniques through the Luna Cocoa project. The jewelry she makes in Halifax draws directly from that foundation, not as imitation but as continuation. The stitches are the same stitches. The knowledge traveled with her.
People connect because they can see the work in the piece. It looks like something made by a person who cared. Which is exactly what it is.
Decorative Embroidery
Embroidered Notebook
Embroidered T-shirt
Mexican Heart
A Heartfelt Note
Majtan means "gift" in Tseltal, the language spoken in the part of Chiapas where I grew up. I chose that word because that is how handmade work has always felt to me — not a transaction, but an offering of time and care and memory.
When I came to Halifax, I brought the knowledge with me. The stitches I learned in Chiapas, the colors and symbols from the textile traditions of southern Mexico, the years I spent working alongside artisans to keep those traditions moving. I brought all of it, and for a while I didn't know what to do with it here.
What I discovered, slowly, through conversations with strangers who noticed a piece I was wearing, is that handmade things open doors that other things don't. Someone asks about a stitch, and suddenly we are talking about culture and memory and what people carry when they move from one place to another. That is what I want Majtan Artisans to be. Not just something beautiful to wear, but a small piece of a world that deserves to be known here.
If you have bought something, or if you are thinking about it: thank you. You are supporting handmade work, cultural preservation, and the idea that immigrant creativity belongs in every city. Every piece leaves my hands carrying something of where I come from. I hope it brings a little warmth into wherever you are.
— Rubi
