Silkworm Eggs Hatching

I have about 1700 babies in the house right now. Each ring of eggs has about 450-500 eggs. A metal cup is placed over the moth so that she doesn't walk all over the place laying eggs. The following spring it is easy to calculate how many silkworms to raise by counting the rings and letting the amount needed to hatch.

Dying with Four-Wing Evening-Primrose

An old friend dropped by the shop and asked if I had ever dyed with Tsukimiso (Moon Watching Grass) or in English, a common variety of Four Wing Evening Primrose. I hadn't even heard of it. She said that it dyed a deep purple after having the initial yellow pigment removed in boiling water then in the second boiling being decocted in an alkaline dye bath and then reducing the pH with vinegar and finally mordanted with iron.

You can only get the dark color before the flower buds form in late spring. It sounded like a real pain in the ass to dye with. However, asking around the village it turns out it grows in the gravel on the stream bank just 50 meters from the front door.

The results were great on silk produced last spring. It dyed a pale yellow and instantly went dark purple in the iron mordant. Amazing reaction. On the right side of the picture you can see the pale yellow and on the left side the iron mordanted purple.

Indigo Days

It is stencil dying season again. The sun is warm enough to dry the glue paste. Here I have some lotus patterns I drew/carved last year and an old leaf stencil that Barbara cut out over ten years ago. The material is a hemp/ramie blend. Summer scarves for men and women are popular this year.

Eri spent ages individually trying these small square dots for her quilt project. I was worried it might turn out a little overdone..I was wrong. It tuned out perfect.


The vat was in great shape. All the light green is a sign that there is no oxygen in the vat and tha the pH is high. It is spinning after I stirred it.

New Shop and Workshop

On April 24th I opened a very small gallery and workshop in my town at the entrance to a large prefectural art recreation facility , Fujino Geijutsu no ie . There is a hotel and campground , theater for 300, a woodwork facility, glass work studio, pottery studio etc. I've held workshops here in the past. It was a center for many of the local artists for 15 years. Nine other creative types: potters, a landscape architect, several contemporary glass artists, a few painters, a leather worker making shoes and bags, a wood furniture maker, a Japanese antique dealer and myself. We each have a small separate wood cabin/container like gallery. There is a restaurant in the center with a huge balcony looking out on the mountains.

I set up two indigo vats on my balcony here. I'm taking it slow and letting it evolve without too much structure. I had figured I would have customers come and experiment with indigo dying. I prepared cloth ready to dye. They can bring their old clothes from home and refresh them with indigo. Sadly, it seems that people just come and shop. I pretty much sold out in the first two weeks. (Now I'm in frantic production mode!)

So my blog is suffering.

Slow Day

Class was slow and simple today. My new student Misako is weaving for the first time. Warp of undyed hemp and weft of indigo dyed spun silk floss. It will become the back cushion for her own back strap loom. Ogata san freed up some wooden thread frames for me with the patience of a saint.

Indigo First Steps

This will be my 17th year growing my own indigo and processing it into indigo dye. I grew three varieties of Polygonum tinctorum last year. Round leaf. Pink flower and White flower. Pink flower has the longest growing season and the most pigment content. The round leaf flowers in mid-August making a third harvest impossible.

Ogata san Mari san and I separated the seeds from the chaff yesterday and today I planted 5 seeds in each compartment of these seed trays. The indigo field is a good 15 minutes away from the house by car. Being out of eyesight it never gets the love it deserves and it is easier for me to use the long black plastic sheets with small holes to grow the indigo. The set up is more work than directly planting but I don't need to worry as much about weeds and watering. It is a little easier to harvest as well. I bought a few huge industrial rolls ten years back and promise the 'natural guy' deep inside me that I'll go back to free planting style when it runs out.

Separating the chaff and the seeds:



Indigo seeds:


A few months later It will look like this:


Pictured below is the indigo grown in Laos and commonly known as Tree Indigo or Indigofera tinctoria. I've tried growing it in Japan a few times without success. The actual pigment content is much higher than the native Japanese variety making it easy to process in a settlement tank.


Masato used a plow for the first time. He considered himself a pro after an hour! I plowed in a lot of cow manure this year as the soil seemed a little tired last year.


Here is indigo drying up on my third floor eaves with a good view of my tea field in the background.


And the fermented indigo balls I make each winter.


And me dying some shibori:

Old Japanese Bamboo Reeds

Basically I am an old tool nut. Whether in North America, Europe or Asia I hunt out old tools at antique markets. I find it hard to resist carpentry tools such chisels and saws, farming tools such as scythes and I am powerless against any tool associated with weaving. Large or small I drag them home and the pile up in my attic grows and muliplies. It’s getting really really bad up there.

What is the attraction to these things? I could write volumes on the subject. Another blog even.

These bamboo Osa or reeds I find particularly poetic and fascinating. Very few people really know what they are used for and they are quickly overlooked in markets. They haven’t been swept up as a gentrification décor item like their cousins the spinning wheels yet so they are still inexpensive. I have close to a hundreds of them in every imaginable state of decay.

The ones from the pre-industrial era are of course the most beautiful. Smoke from the open fire in Japanese farmhouses that seems to have smoked and pickled the occupants and every one of their belongings in the past thousand years of Japanese history have left profound patinas on these once ubiquitous household tools.

Like a cooking pot was for food and a saw was for shelter a weaving reed was for clothing.

There seems to be someone still making these reeds somewhere. Perfectly planed slips of madake bamboo. The perfection of the new reeds is impressive. The alternative is a metal reed. These are too heavy to use with a backstrap loom. The metal can effect natural dyes as it gets older. The bamboo ones are simply beautiful. If one is going to that much trouble to actually hand weave the tools should be hand made and warm.

I wanted my students to understand weaving from the roots. I teach them to make their own thread and as many parts of the tools as reasonable. We make our own bamboo reeds. My house is next to and under Madake bamboo groves. I cut the bamboo in November and cut it to 40 cm lengths and quarter and let it dry for two years and then plane it to thin strips to use in making the reeds.

We take apart some old reeds to get at the heart of them and then make fresh ones. They won’t get that glorious smoked bamboo color with modern heating but they do age rather gracefully.

Today Naomi continued to work on her first reed. One centimeter will have twelve eyes.