One of his embroidered shirts has gone to Britain. His own stock of clothes includes a total of six embroidered shirts. He is good at painting and embroidering. His mother Liudmyla recalls how the class teacher of the Lutsk Oblast Boarding Lyceum thought up rhymes about every student of her, which would define their talents and qualities, and the audience had to guess the name. As for her son, there was no need in racking the brains: the fact that Yura is a good embroider is common knowledge in the lyceum.
What are the origins of this hobby, quite odd for a boy? It was in the eighth form that he got a threaded needle in his hand for the first time. Mother was the embroider in their family. Once he also had a desire to make a cross-stitch on linen. This attempt was followed by embroidering a napkin and then a towel used for covering an Easter basket. Later he embroidered two large rushnyks, which are now decorating the icons in the Nechypors’ house. His experiments could have ended there, because his interest was satisfied, but once the boy saw an age-old shirt with an original black-yellow-brown embroidered pattern. He has embroidered a similar one for himself.
Nechypor is now a student at the Industrial Biotechnology Department in the Kyiv University of Food Technologies. He has already embroidered eight shirts for himself, though he has given one of them to an acquaintance who was going to study in Great Britain. The latter asked him for one as he had heard that it is prestigious for Ukrainians to wear vyshyvankas there. Yurko gave another one to his friend as a present and kept the rest for his own use.
His favorite shirt is the one with a white pattern embroidered on black linen, because it goes along with the jeans. He was offered 3,000 dollars for this one, because it is an “exclusive” kind, embroidered using threads that look like beads from afar. The boy says that in Kyiv people wear vyshyvankas on weekdays more frequently than in his native Lutsk.
One of his latest works is also original — a white pattern on white linen. The ornament is soft and elegant, and what a delicate work it is! You will never see a knot or defect on the reverse side of Nechypor’s embroidery. The cross-stitches are small and the embroidery is so perfect that it looks more like a picture.
His mother says that folk arts are not the only interest for her son. Like his father, Yurii, he is also skillful in all kinds of men’s work: painting, concreting, laying bricks and tiles, and plastering.
