30 Layers of Persimmon Paper Stencils

Instead of regular class at the house on Tuesdays my students and I visited an antique dealer's house in Tokyo who had come to have several thousand old katagami stencils for luxury kimono. The master  craftsman who had owned and used them had passed away over 20 years ago and his children were cleaning up his old studio/ house to tear it down and sell the land.

Antique markets in Japan always have a few stalls selling rolls of these stencils for someone to purchase and use as an interior design object. Lampshades or perhaps to be framed. Very few people know how the stencils were actually used. We were there to purchase stencils we could use as well as glean ideas for stencils we could design and cut ourselves. Some were just so breathtaking in their complexity we bought them just to have and marvel at on a rainy day.  This was an untouched intact, previously unpicked over jackpot of katagami stencils. Oh la la. 

Uncomfortably rummaging, not only through someone's life but also through a nearly extinct and breathtaking  kimono dyeing technique was both debilitating as well as invigorating. We were seriously burnt-out after a few hours of evaluating stencils as our eyes and criteria sharpened with each hundred leafed-through, while filling out our personal collections.

Many of the stencils came in bundles of 30. Wrap your head around this.... It would take 30 (or many more) individually hand-carved stencils, for each colour and to resist areas with rice-paste to dye the background colours. These were for Edo Sarasa stencil technique kimono from the 1960's through to the late 80's when the craftsman had passed away.

A book could be written about the pile of stencils and sketches and cloth samples on the table beside me. It hasn't been written and I don't have the time to do it. Just a blog entry.

With some bundles of stencils were the hand drawn original sketches for the patterns that also acted as colour keys for the dyer to use. Here are a few I picked up. You can see the Indian and Arabic influences along with the pure Japanese stuff. These are the patterns that would be repeatedly dyed on 14 meters of silk with seamless accuracy. A thousand hours of work? More?

An individual stencil would be cut for each colour and a series of stencils cut to resist the pattern so that the background colour could be applied.

This leaf pattern stencil is easy to understand. Only three stencils instead of thirty. The paper is the smoked persimmon tannin layered paper that has been developed over hundreds of years to perfectly fit with these dyeing techniques.

Here is a small swatch of Edo Sarasa cloth. 

I will write more about that day in the next few blogs. The ingenuity of the stencil designs and the how we will use some of our given-up-for-dead stencils. I would prefer for my students to design and carve our own original stencils but since we bought these we should respect them and use them a few times.

Indigo Guys

It has been good to have some guys over to indigo dye recently.  (My women students are happy with this as these guys have all been handsome and creative.) Serge is back semi-woofing and semi-indigo studying. One day up the mountain cleaning up the tea terraces, the next day sewing cloth, the following day cutting down bamboo and the next day at the indigo vat. He brought some great linen from New Zealand and took his time to bring out the beauty of the cloth in this piece.  He is toying with the idea of being an indigo craftsman. He has the patience.

Ted came by twice to shibori and katazome. He has a good eye at the antique market. (This is the way to get the teacher's attention. ) Working as a designer in California with a Japanese wife, I am sure I'll see him again when he visits Japan next year. He caught the indigo bug fast.

The sashiko re-inforced corners of the furoshiki are so cool that I started Ogata san on a copy immediately.  Ted found these at the antique market in Kyoto.

The Spring 20I3 Indigo Workshops at my Farmhouse in Japan:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vKGq9uyqSqFRksQDh2Y0HPDhknzzdgQczv1rxwk7nwM/edit

Sabi Frozen Indigo

The conversation often turns to Japanese ideas of aesthetics after a few rounds of hot sake in the chilly evenings with friends from overseas. The words Wabi and Sabi are almost worn out. I lifted this definition from some book years ago and never ran across it again.

'Wabi refers to a cricket on a leaf sheltered by a second leaf over the edge of a misty pond, chirping forlornly with no one listening.'

'Sabi can be seen in the dry yellowed curling bottom two leaves of a wild chrysanthemum  in late autumn. The sun barely gives enough heat and the last blossom of the year won't have the energy to open.'


Blandina, Judi and fellow indigo sisters poked holes in the dry dirt in the seed trays and carefully dropped in a few indigo seeds on their way out the door last spring.  The seedlings grew in front of the house and they were watered and cared for throughout the sweltering summer. One good harvest of indigo leaves in August and then they were left to go to seed for next years crop.

The seeds are ready to take but the beauty of the forlorn bitter frozen blue leaves and the wilting chrysanthemum plants amongst them made it hard to uproot them. The birds will find the seeds sooner than later.

 These terms are used for pottery,  lifestyles,  textiles. Sabi is harder to get a direct hit with.  It is nearing the end of an exhausting, eventful and fulfilling year for me. Sabi was ascendant just moments before.  I just watched this youtube of the Little Drummer Boy,  and the spirit of Christmas hit me right in the chest. And good ol' Dylan playing and implying a few roles at once....the singer, the drummer and the king. A tissue in each hand might come in handy for this one. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcXW0Se4HMs


I'll pick the dried indigo flowers and winnow the seeds tomorrow. Sabi is over for this year. Time for some yuletide spirit in the mountains of Japan.

The 20I3 Spring Indigo Workshops at my Farmhouse in Japan:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vKGq9uyqSqFRksQDh2Y0HPDhknzzdgQczv1rxwk7nwM/edit

Indigo and Persimmon Silk Knits.

Several kilograms of silk laboriously dyed with persimmon tannin last summer were headed for a loom but somehow are ending up on the knitting machines. (Perhaps a tad prematurely.)  It will take a few months to get the hang of the small sock knitter. There are so many mysterious mechanisms on mechanisms that perform some subtle function. One of the old craftsman told me that more than a few of the gears and levers and feed lines were never used in the past 40 years since he has been operating the machines. With this said, my hope to master the whole machine and knit process, was left with a few runs in it. (Like the runs in socks when a needle is slightly off kilter.)

Liza and I fed and re-fed the machine with wool and linen and silk and cotton of different gauges to take some of the guesswork out of the finer tuning nuances of the machine. We learned something but it will take many hundreds if not thousands of hours standing beside the machines and trying new things out to play it well. Learning the scales so to speak. And then by chance, some masterpieces of subtlety might even appear.

The shinier of the persimmon dyed silk (It had been de-gummed more.) worked beautifully with a random gradation lightly indigo dipped spun silk thread. The excitement of the possibilities of the combination of these two threads gave me a splitting headache. Too many synapses firing at once. Overheat.

Unfortunately the persimmon dyed thread is slightly too thick. Dyeing  thinner thread will have to wait until May until the ultra-violet rays are strong enough to dye.  What a dream to have the shelves at the shop full of indigo and persimmon dyed silk of all gauges and shades.

These are a start. The stripes are borderline court-jester and have to have their density and width adjusted. To do that, the plier pulling out and changing of  a few dozen small pieces on the machine will have to wait until more pressing techniques are more familiar.




There is a hole in my life with Snoopy gone. I'll go pick her ashes up tomorrow from the pet crematorium. Next weekend we will have a Snoopy farewell get-together outside the front door and put her in the garden there next to the little Buddhist stone sculpture and near the plum tree. She will be close by and I can 'toss her an imaginary dog biscuit' whenever I come and go from the house.
I like to think of her like this. Coming back from a walk by herself. Smiling.

 I think the last paragraph of Charlotte's Web went something like this:
Wilbur never forgot Charlotte although he loved her children and grandchildren deeply. None of the new spiders quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. 

As Snoopy was.... It is not often a dog comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Snoopy was both.

Oyasuminasai Snoopy

I lived with Snoopy for nineteen years and I was her third owner. I suppose she was over 23 years old. She had a good life. Free here in the mountains. She passed away in her sleep a few hours back. She has been suffering since last August. I am going to miss her. 

Goodnight ol' Snooperoo.

Fair Trade Textile Buddy

Safia and I share almost the same birth date and year. We arrived in Japan 24 years ago around the same time. We area both textile nuts. We used to spend so much time together and now we squeeze a years worth of gossip, updates and future plans in under 24 hours. She is the founder of People Tree and Global Village. Always on the go. A dozen conversations and ideas going at once. Wish you were here more Saf. If someone out there is interested in Fair trade please Google 'Safia Minney'. She knows more about sustainable textile development in the world than almost anyone.

A few years back in Laos.

Safia Minney: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1B_Oq97RALg

Indigo Knit Studio Open

Driving back and forth to Hon Atsugi over the past year and slowly tearing down and rebuilding the old place, gnome-like in a dark cave, suddenly seemed worthwhile this weekend as the knit machine started to humm and buzz and to well.....knit  The studio looks somewhat magical and creative energy is ready to burst forth. There will be four of us for the time being. Daphne, Liza, Kurihara san and myself. I am being cautious at first. Not wanting to force anything to germinate that isn't organic and healthy. The original footing is important. I am excited about the possibilities of making some cool clothes from natural dyed silk, cotton, linen and wool knitted on our mid-50's knitters. My three partners are all gung-ho as well. Learning how to work these babies. The samples we made yesterday were great.

Justin and Noriko came and helped out last moth. Thank you to all the helpers.