Sewing, embroidery and horsehair weaving have been considered traditional handicrafts among Yakut women since time immemorial. The products of Boturussky craftswomen, such as the women’s coat “onolooh son”, dress “khaladaai”, hat “dyabaka”, as well as mittens, shoe trims, mats and leather koumiss dishware, which are represented in the collections of the Churapchinsky Museum, are characterized by a variety of stitches, patterned seams, fur and leather dressing, harmonious patterning and decorative design.

Women’s cloth mittens on display are trimmed with beaver fur and embroidered with silk threads and multicolored beads in decorative patterns. According to the notes of the first director of the museum, ethnographer and folklorist Andrey Savvin, they were made in about 1920 by a Yakut craftswoman Anastasia Ignatieva. He described the exhibit in 1950,

The bead embroidery by Yakut craftswomen was done using high-quality technological processing, which is confirmed, in particular, by the preserved beadwork on clothes recovered from burial sites. The secret of the needlewomen was that they laid coarse cloth (canvas), under the main material, which was temporarily joined to the fabric with running stitch.

Mittens have always been considered an important part of the Yakut national costume. The researchers Svetlana Nogovitsyna and Alexandra Zakharova in their article distinguish two types of mittens based on the cut: fur mittens, which were made of fur, with fur outside, with hare or fox lining; and deerskin, or cloth mittens, which were made of cloth with a warm lining of fur with soft underfur, such as hare, fox or Arctic fox.

Such mittens, “ytylyk” in Yakut, were decorated with embroidery of colored threads in traditional Yakut decorative motifs: lyre-shaped, heart-shaped, vegetal designs with stylized flowers, shoots, leaves and branches of plants.

In the article “Making Yakut mittens ‘uostaakh ytylyk’”, Stepanova and Zakharova note, “The smart mittens of Yakut women had special decorative feature — they were covered with embroidered patterns — ohuordaakh ytylyk. Such mittens are decorated in different ways, but the patterns of ornamentation of the top and cuffs are usually identical in their design.“