Japanese Textile Workshops  日本のテキスタイル ワークショップ

Living in a small mountain village just outside of Tokyo, I grow a crop of indigo every year and process the leaves into dye using traditional methods. I also breed silk moths, raise the silkworms and then reel/spin the silk from the cocoons. The silk is then dyed with natural dyes and finally woven on traditional Japanese looms. I run several ten-day live-in workshops a year at the old farmhouse here in Japan focusing on the Japanese use of indigo. Contact me for information.

Saturday, 21 February 2015

The Easiest Silk Cocoon to Thread Technique.

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The easiest way to make a thread from a cocoon is to 'mostly melt' the natural glue that holds the cocoon together and just pull the...
1 comment:
Tuesday, 10 February 2015

Cocoons to Thread

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These 3500 little specks of black pepper are actually baby silkworms born last spring at the house. Twenty-five days later they were s...
8 comments:
Tuesday, 3 February 2015

Fabric Shopping in Tokyo. Nippori is the Place. (?)

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Linen thread is of course the best thing in the world to make your indigo vat feel useful and it's life meaningful. Linen woven by hand...
13 comments:
Friday, 30 January 2015

Ogata San is Well. The Fukushima Pups are Well.

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Ogata san, being a typical Leo just laughed her famous guffaw when I told her yesterday that I had received a flood of get-well-fan-mail. Sh...
14 comments:
Wednesday, 28 January 2015

Indigo Buddhist Project Stirring.

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I've monkeyed around with stencil dyed Buddhist images and indigo for many years. Always hesitating to be using images appropriated from...
7 comments:
Tuesday, 20 January 2015

Teaching Japanese Textiles in Japan.

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Today was regular Tuesday textile class at my house. Trying to simplify life and get rid of some possessions I handed out a few boxes of sil...
18 comments:
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Bryan's Japanese Textiles
My home is in a vertical mountain village in Fujino just outside of Tokyo. It is here, in my 150 year old silk farming house I hold classes and workshops related to Japanese textiles. Our village shrine dates back 650 years. I’ve dug up dozens of 5000-year-old Jomon-era pottery shards near by. Twenty-one houses are scattered and perched on ledges along a narrow twisting road. Most of the somewhat ramshackle farmhouses designed for silk farming cling poetically to the deep shadows of afternoon. The land reached by the sun was either too steep to build on or was used to grow enough food to survive. From the front of my house I can see well-tended tea terraces ascending impossibly upward. Climb up the hillside and from the queues of tea you can survey my old farmhouse and on extra clear days even spy a self-conscious Mt Fuji.
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