Two Month Live in Apprentice: Mini chan

I get requests for long-term live-in apprentices. I want to teach young designers about indigo and silk and Japanese textiles in depth. It occurred to me that it would take at least several years of full time working with a student to impart a decent amount of knowledge. What am I going to do with it? Take it with me at the end of my life? I've refused quite a few eager beavers but finally accepted Mini-chan from Singapore. Just by the tone of her emails I felt she really wanted to study. She wanted a longer apprenticeship but I felt that two months was enough for me to see if we get along. The farmhouse is in the mountains and there is no alternative place to stay except in the guest rooms on the third floor.  So I have  stranger living in the house with me for several months....
I took the chance and it looks like no problem with Mini.
I have a second young designer coming from Finland soon. I might just enjoy this. The farmhouse is ramshackle but cool. I have interesting people coming through from all over the world. Life is pretty good. Those five guest rooms upstairs were a good idea.

Mini is starting off with how to make and maintain a hydro sulphate indigo vat. She indigo dyes something every day. Shibori and katazome and thread. I try to give her a reasonable idea of how a design studio based around indigo might work in her future. Her original design sensibilities are very different from my own. Her portfolio is full of gauzy ultra-feminine draped designs in contrast to my chunky rough indigo and persimmon dyed work. She follows me to the knit studio and I put her to work doing something new every day. She had a full on course on silk cocoon reeling. A complete overload of information but she takes it all in. I'll keep posting on her progress over the next few months.

Katazome Technique Number Five: Hikibori

The final technique is Hikibori. This is the technique most commonly used for Yukata, (cotton summer kimono) and Yuzen dyeing. The blade is drawn towards the carver. The technique is difficult to diffentiate with the push blade technique. The blade for hikibori is shorter than the one used in Tsukibori. Very fine curves are more easily cut with the push technique, tsukibori than the hikibori pull technique.

I use this hikibori technique the most. I will move onto tsukibori in the near future. I'll go back to Ise this summer and find the specific cutters and boards and determine the appropriate paper and figure out the essentials of this designs that fit the tsukibori  technique. Here are two dyed pieces from stencils I have cut with the hikibori technique.

I have a lot to write about on the subject of these five katazome techniques. With the spring workshops fast approaching it is not the time.  I will get back to the subject when things have settled down. The techniques them selves are fascinating but there is much more to the subject. 

Katazome Technique Number Four: Tsukibori

The knife for tsukibori is essentially the same as the knife for shimabori except it is sharpened to a more slender point and the handle is longer. The sharp side of the knife is pointed away from the cutter thus the name 'push cutting' as opposed to 'pull cutting'. The blade is pushed through the several layers of paper with a sawing motion over a hole in a wood cutting board beneath. This technique is used to cut delicate patterns. (I have been using the pull technique for the past 15 years and now have to change my wicked ways.) Just look at what he is carving. He said it will take him a week to finish this particular stencil.

Hiro won't let me sleep until I post this on the blog. I was grumpy as a wrinkled mandarin orange because I had repeatedly refused this director. He was a nice guy, but showing up at the door without an appointment and a camera crew.... I hate speaking Japanese on camera. Who translated this? The subtitles are way off. Or is my Japanese that bad?

0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzKG0wXvui0

Katazome Technique Part Three: Shimabori

This third technique seems easy enough to categorize. Shimabori, stripe-carving, is about cutting the stencil paper in stripes to create a striped surface pattern on kimono material. (The obvious question is why stencil on stripes when they could be warped on in real-time colours in the first place?) I found that designs that are somewhat stripy were categorized as shimabori at one studio and categorized as tsukibori at a museum.This needs to be clarified. I'll do that next time I travel to Ise.

We saw many striped shimabori examples but didn't take many pictures. Here is an example. There is a person standing behind the stencil and she is not part of the design!

The technique looks simple because the cutter simply draws the blade along a straight edge. A minute inconsistency in the width of the stripe would be obvious to the eye. One centimeter can have 11 hairline stripes (22 cuts).

Here are a few stencils from a book. There are some variations on the stripes.

What makes these striped stencils so unique is the netting that is attached to hold the structure together so it can have paste scraped across it without ripping to pieces while leaving behind an orderly pattern of rice paste on the cloth. Usually a silk net is lacquered in place on the surface of the stencil.

This is impossible with a striped stencil as the stripes will not behave well enough to be set in place. They will twist and bunch together. The ingenious technique is to sandwich a layer of silk net between two identical stencils and re-align the stripes so they sit on top of each other.

I thought I had read that this technique had died out. The last thread insertion craftswoman had passed away 30 years ago. But no. When visiting the kakishibu paper making studio I pulled back a curtain as I was snooping around the factory to reveal a woman working on inserting a silk thread mesh into a stripe stencil. I literally shouted with excitement. I climbed into the room and enthusiastically gushed at the respect I had for the ingenuity of the technique and my overflowing respect for the woman who had mastered this insanely beautiful and practical art form. 

You can see the master craftswoman herself behind her work. You can see the silk cross threads holding the stripes in place in more or less their proper position on the top half of the stencil. They are sandwiched in place between the two identical stencils with a brushed-on coating of persimmon tannin. The lower bands of paper are temporarily added while the stripes are manipulated to match up and then gently pulled off as she works down the stencil.

Here you can see the temporarily places bands that hold the stripes in place while the thread is applied on one side of the paper.

The paper is stretched on a frame to keep it from wrinkling and making the work of threading a net possible. The cross sandwiched support threads are visible.

Bamboo pegs are used instead of metal nails that would react with persimmon tannin. The silk thread is woven back and forth across the top of the bottom stencil. The tannin is coated on. The second stencil is placed on top sandwiching the thread between. The two layers of the stencils are meticulously aligned with a thin bamboo knife-like tool.  The silk thread looks to be ten cocoons reeled and left unspun and not de-gummed.  Jeeesh...is this exciting stuff or what? I want to go back and study this technique from her for a few weeks. Perhaps this summer!

Katazome Technique Number Two: Dougubori

The second type of katagami stencil carving is callled, dougubori (tool carved). The stencil carver makes the punch-like tools in the desired shape. The pattern is drawn onto the paper and five additional layers are fixed together with a paper cord passing through  holes near the top edge of the papers. The pattern is sometimes purposely slightly warped to make it easier on the eye.  Figurative motifs are used as well as abstract geometric patterns. This technique is usually impossible for katagami enthusiasts to produce as the tool making and maintenance is an additional art in itself.

These stencils are usually used as a negative. What you see is what you get. The white spaces stay white on the cloth because they are rice-paste-resisted. They are used with chemical dyes for the most part. The dye has to be cold or the paste will melt. Traditionally these patterns were used with indigo.

Katazome Technique Number One: Kiribori.

I can't sleep with too much excitement over my trip last week to Kyoto and Ise to visit textile related studios and museums.

The trip mostly focused on Katazome.

There are five basic categories of stencils. Your eyes may glaze over reading that but stick with me through  these next few blogs.

Kiribori is the oldest technique. It is carved with a semicircle awe like this one.  The carvers make their own tools.  The size of the semicircle determines the size of the hole. The tools increase in minute fractions of diameter.

The tool is held carefully at a 90 degree angle to the stack of six persimmon tannin papers (You can see them bound together with  the white paper threads.) and a slight twisting action against a deerskin thimble of sorts drills/cuts the hole.

 It is supposedly the most difficult of the five techniques. There were once hundreds of Kiribori stencil cutters. There are only a few left who work at this level. We were particularly interested shark skin patterns this time and the master carver was kind enough to give us a private demonstration.

Rice paste is scraped over the wet stencil and later dyed, then the paste removed. The shark skin pattern was usually dyed with indigo. The stencil carver explained that there were no indigo craftsmen capable of dyeing this pattern left.
 Chemical dyes like this purple are used.

Here is a copy of the stencil that made this pattern in the process of being carved. The whet stones for the carving tools are sitting on the paper.

 There were dozens of variations of this shark skin pattern in the Edo period.  Samurai would order a stencil that he had exclusive rights to use for his formal wear. Later as the merchant class evolved they copied the class they sought to emulate with similar patterns and stencil dyed kimonos became common and the production increased exponentially for several hundred years. There are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of different patterns. The artistic quality varied however, the ingenuity and skill levels of the artists/craftsmen is still mind-boggling. With so few artisans working on these and the almost disappearance of kimono in the last 70 years the originality and artistic quality has plummeted. It seems a certain critical number of artisans is needed to sustain the art.

 Many of these stencils are copies of old stencils from the 19th century. The old stencils are placed on the paper and the pattern is stencilled on to new paper using a powder-puff type brush with thickened ink. The black portion of the stencil is then carved out. That is rather depressing to witness, however there are simply no people with sufficient design, carving and drawing skills left on the planet to come up with designs that are near the level of those from pre-industrial times.

Different sizes of the carving awles can be used to create these kind of patterns:

The artisans are desperately trying to keep these breathtaking skills alive by thinking of new applications for the stencils. Interior design goods are one area they are focusing on. This also gets a little depressing. The history and skill and artistry of these stencils is not respected with the design level of the products they are coming up with. Are there any rocking genius designers out there that could do these stencils and their history justice?

The idea of creating a stained glass effect by sandwiching the stencils between glass on doors was not bad. The doors they had designed for the project were horrible shellacked nightmares. There is a huge multi-gazillion yen building dedicated to showing off these beautiful stencils and their history. There are a dozen government workers forlornly walking around. Can't they find a designer and carpenter to make a decent solid Zelkova wood door? Something elegant or stately or even run-down and shabby chic perhaps? Something that has just a smidgen of poetry and humanity in it's design? It just makes you want to tear your hair out and scream in desperation.  

The peace and quiet and breathtaking beauty of this Zen temple in the countryside quieted my angst. Tanaka san and I had the entire complex to ourselves on a Saturday afternoon. Heaven.

Spinning CVM Romeldale from New Hampshire.

The classes at the house focus around Japanese textiles, however the two big Scandinavian looms get a lot of attention. They needed to be treated with more respect so I started teaching the students to spin wool and weave blankets. I follow Nancy Zeller's Long Ridge Farm blog and am always impressed with her wonderful life and skills.
http://longridgefarm.blogspot.jp

 Instead of sourcing wool from the craft store in Japan I introduced my Japanese students to Nancy's world and ordered a huge box of wool. She included pictures of the donor sheep that will make the whole spinning and weaving and finally having the blanket so much more meaningful. Thank you Nancy. We 'prosumed' slightly more than we consumed this time around.

 I have very little experience with wool so in order to not make myself look bad in front of the students tomorrow I spent the day spinning some of the roving she sent. It spins beautifully.

http://longridgefarm.blogspot.jp