Our story
Oshana helps women stitch their lives back together. At our studio in Beirut, Oshana elders train women displaced from Syria and Palestine, working alongside Lebanese women impacted by conflict, to become highly-skilled artisans, creating beautiful handmade embroidery and crochet.
We pay our makers in full for their work, which we sell on their behalf.
Oshana was founded by refugee women, for refugee women. 100% of our profits support women displaced by war.
One-of-a-kind homeware, clothing and accessories. Handmade by Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian women affected by war.
Oshana is the design thread of Makani, a charity that supports women to find freedom and confidence through arts and opportunity.
Every Oshana piece is made with love. Sometimes by one hand, sometimes by several working together. Making as a group allows our women to connect without the need for words, though these often follow. The outcome of each piece is as unique and beautiful as the process involved in the making.
We believe in joy as an act of resistance; purpose as a means of hope; creativity as a form of escapism.
As explained by one of our artisans, Fedwa, 69 (pictured left), working at the studio in Lebanon is not just a form of income but also, crucially, a way to momentarily forget all that she has endured.
‘When I work, all my thoughts are on my work. I’m thinking about the colours, I’m counting the stitches. When I stop working, my thoughts turn to the past.
‘To the time when I had a house, and my six children were around me, and my mother, and my husband. Now I am alone… The work prevents a feeling of emptiness, it stops me thinking of the past. And the colours cheer me up, they give me life. So that if I do want to remember the past, I remember it in a colourful way.
‘When you are doing colourful work, if you put it down and close your eyes, you feel like you are in a beautiful garden.’