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

Back-strap Loom Weaving

Projects get started and not finished. The inspiration gets lost. It doesn't turn out right. Other things come up. What should one do? If the project is simple like dyeing thread and the colour is not just right it is easy to over dye. But weaving something can take ages. And ages. You could waste weeks weaving away at something that will never be worth it. This goes for cutting stencils. The touch can be wrong. Do you keep on cutting away or just scrap it?

 No. No. No. It isn't working. It could be much better.
A clumsy warp. A stencil that lacks something. It is better to try to salvage the thread or use part of a stencil. I can be ruthless if it seems like it will become a time waster. Out it goes.

I've had this warp on my back strap loom for........um...... over....four years. There were too many other things on the go. A few meters had been woven and it was a rare piece that was coming out exactly as envisioned. But it had been left too long on the loom and had probably atrophied. There was not much to do except cut off the thread and start something new on the loom. A few passes of the shuttle and it was apparent that it wasn't a write-off and the rest of the warp could probably be woven up.  It was originally warped  as an experiment with the color scheme and a thread test.

The inspiration for the weave had come from a January sunset. (The photo reminds me much of the one that Velma has recently posted on her blog.) Madder and tannin and pale indigo sky with dark menacing tree branches warping upwards. It is finally on it's way to being finished. There may be enough for a men's obi or if not there wil be plenty to make various bags for the tea ceremony.

It is great to be weaving again on a back strap loom. Your whole body get's involved in the weave. It weaves up so tightly.

Facing Exhibition Preparation Paralysis

Someone very interesting with a very very interesting project  visited me yesterday.

I won't name drop because he is kind of well known and working on an art piece that may take several years from his original inspiration, following research and then actual execution to take place. He needs his privacy until it is in the museum or gallery or wherever he chooses to exhibit this particular work of art.

This work will center around a single(?) katazome piece that he painstakingly researches and produces from scratch over these several years.

Wow. Was I impressed? He contacted me last year and asked to drop by for a visit and talk. He was bit of a blessing without a disguise. I've been struggling with several ideas over the past few years. They have been coming into focus lately but had not crystallized. I live by myself, (albeit with a lot of guests dropping by) in a quiet mountain village in Japan. Daily stimulation with nature but not much with the broader constructions of the world around me and my work. (You can't have everything.)

I made some relatively good work for an  exhibition with Tohei and Eros in Europe a few years ago. I was busy being the organizer/logistics man and the work I was to exhibit was second to my responsibilities there.  The work had to be good enough that I wasn't embarrassed. And not embarrassing for them. It was shown with two guys who leave puddles of talent behind when they walk.

That was the level of the bar. Pretty low. I know. Well, the work ended up being a few notches above the lowest common denominator. But my contribution to the whole exhibition could have been much much more. It needed to be lifted from the 'craft' category to something more complex. I saved face by knowing a lot about silk farming and indigo processing, tea ceremony etc... blah... blah. Old stuff for me. I am tired of it. The talks and workshops I held on those subjects saved me. The work sitting and hanging there needed all my effort to communicate the value of Japanese textiles. (Covertly, of course.) The work itself could hold it's own but only to those with a good eye. It wasn't slowing down the fast gallery walkers like Eros and Tohei's work that could stop everyone in their tracks.

I was asked a few days back on what I was planning to do for my next exhibition. I replied that I know what materials I will use. I know what colours and what the basic inspiration is. I just haven't found the groove to slide into and and rhythm to keep going and not stall part way there.

After a full day talking with my visitor yesterday I could sense a groove not far away and felt my feet sense some soft surface below, a no-fear-of-slipping ground. I felt the grass between my toes with socks still on so to speak.  (I slept deep but was exhausted this birthday (49) morning with my head still spinning with possibilities of tackling an exhibition a few years from now. (I want to have it in Italy. Somewhere far away and beautiful with food, killer coffee and stone alleys.)

My visitor is a European artist, who studied film making, print making and textiles at art university. He usually spends a year on a single short film. Using actual film, he crafts the images millisecond at a time to come up with the highest resolution images that sometimes work with intricate surfaces that somehow manifest an interference pattern of sorts. I immediately thought of models of a holographic universe, where all the information of the universe is mathematically present in a minute sliver of the actual interference structure. This image of how the universe is structured has been with me since I was a teenager. Sad to say, it has sat there in my head. When I spread the rice paste on a stencil and then intentionally slightly shift it it to get a offset shadow it comes to mind. I was blown away when my guest intimated that he would like to work around this idea with Japanese stencil dyeing.

 I smiled so much my eyebrows hurt.

He was caught by a small scrap of old Japanese material he saw in a museum on Rhode Island. It was a Katazome piece and with his past work and appreciation with the subtle complexity and shocking simplicity of interference patterns he immediately recognized the sophistication of the Japanese pattern maker / stencil cutter hundreds of years before in a place he had never visited.  While researching his trip to Japan to research all aspects of katazome he found this blog and contacted me.

Looking though a few of the well-thumbed through old books I have collected on Japanese textiles we were able to ooh and awe and pound the table in amazement when we recognized the genius of some of these old pieces pictured.  He is a fine artist and will produce a single cool untouchable piece and place it in the middle of a spotless gallery to sit in splendid isolation.

I soooo respect and envy that.

I'll aim at 12 pieces that are warmer and beg to be placed in someone's home and perhaps have good food and killer coffee eventually spilled on them.

Maiwa Workshops In Vancouver

I've had a few emails after mentioning that I will be in Vancouver this fall giving three workshops at Maiwa. They have pretty much been planned out. Maiwa hasn't posted the workshops yet. They run such first class textile workshops I am honoured to have been asked. To make it worth their while, (plane tickets from Japan are not cheap) I will give two two-day workshops and a single day workshop as well as a lecture with wine etc. I'll also be having an exhibition nearby at Diana Sanderson's Silk Weaving Studio. Maiwa allows the workshop leader's to sell their work at the workshops however, I do not think I will have time to prepare anything. Missed opportunity approaching ...grrr.

Japan is not that far away from Vancouver, just over the ocean if you think about it.   It would be delight to meet any blog readers in person. I haven't spent more than a few days in Vancouver over the past 25 years. Beautiful city but I never thought I would see the skies above it again. Charlotte, the owner of Maiwa just does such a mind-boggling wonderful work creating and preserving and supporting textile culture, I wanted to see first hand what she has accomplished and take a small part in her vision.

The lecture will be on my experiences with silk farming here in Japan and some stories of working in the remote area of Laos with development projects concerning silk. I'll have some pictures etc.



.http://www.maiwa.com/home/workshops/index.html


Here is the rough run down; (Sorry for a quick cut and paste from my correspondence with Maiwa.)
Outline Japanese Indigo Workshop
Saturday and Sunday October 5th and 6th 10am - 4pm
Maiwa East 16 students

Introduction of indigo. Different kinds in the world with a brief history.
History and use in Japan.
Japanese aesthetics and indigo.
Okinawan indigo is different.
My background in Japanese indigo.

Show samples of indigo dyed Japanese cloth and discuss them.
From seed to dyepot explanation with pictures and samples.
Japanese craftsmanship ideals and indigo.

Dye a gradient piece of indigo. Small linen piece or something from Maiwa, (pending advice).
Dye skeins of cotton, linen, degummed silk, natural silk and wool. Discuss indigo quality on different materials. Advice for dyeing thread skeins in indigo.

Brief history of shibori and it’s affinity with indigo. Look at Motohiko Katano’s work. Use him as an example of a quintessential Japanese craftsman.
Shibori preparation. SImple mokume. Folding triangles.
Dyeing the shibori.
Katazome demonstration and brief talk. Show samples. Each member will dye a small katazome piece of linen.

Discussion of indigo in Japan now. Contemporary Japanese indigo craftspeople.

The second two day workshop will be on under-dyeing with indigo.

The goal of the workshop is for the participants to experience the possibilities of under-dyeing with red, yellow and gray to get subtle colors when combined with indigo.

There are no natural green dyes in nature. You have to use a shade of yellow in combination with indigo or another blue dye to achieve them.  The depth of the green is determined by the amount of dips in the indigo. The shade of green is determined by which yellow/orange tone is created with a particular natural dye and particular mordant.

Shades of purples are created by under-dyeing with a red dye. Madder is the most stable but lac and cochineal used with iron or alum can create an almost endless spectrum of reds and purples. Tuscan reds, eggplant and dark plum etc. I will just use madder for the reds in the workshop at Maiwa.

The Indigo pigment doesn’t make a chemical bond with the material, simply a mechanical bond so it is weak to abrasion. (Blue jeans fade because the indigo is worn and washed off.) This is important to consider when combining indigo with other dyes, especially on silk where the initial bond of indigo and fibre is not strong to begin with.  The occasional tendency to fade should be incorporated into the textile from the start. The dyed piece can be expected to ‘age’ to a certain degree. The students need to understand this well.

Over the two days of the workshop the students will dye pieces of silk (and perhaps cotton) cloth with gardenia pods to get a vibrant yellow, onion skins to get a rusty orange, and madder to get a red. Those pieces of cloth will be divided into eleven sections. One section will be left as the original color. The remaining sections will be dipped and dyed from one time until ten times in the indigo to get a gradient of purples and greens. The cloth will then be divided up so that each member will return home with several  sample cards with the gradient colors attached.

I will thoroughly explain the propensities of wool, plant fibres, and silk with indigo and how the under - dyeing processes differ in technique and result. I am afraid we will be pushed for time but will prepare some skeins of each material to give a visual back up to the explanation if time allows.

Each student will dye a silk scarf to take home using the technique learned.

I am debating with myself to use cotton (in addition to silk) or not. Impregnating it with a protein may simply be too much information for the workshop members. I will talk about it, and perhaps bring some pre-dyed sample pieces to dye with the students. I will run through the exact workshop with my students here in Japan in the spring to ensure it runs like clockwork. Then I will know if I will have the time to add material or have to reduce the amount of time spent on dyeing.


The third workshop will be:

The first hour will be spent on talking about the process of making cocoons and what can be done with them. Different classes of cocoons and how the waste silk leftover from the reeling process is used. I’ll bring thread samples and photographs.

Since it takes several hours to boil cocoons in an alkaline solution to make floss we will immediately start boiling the cocoons after the initial introduction. They will be ready to use after lunch.

After lunch we will reel cocoons in different ways to produce different threads. The students will take home the thread and floss and a few cocoons. The goal of the workshop is to show how different threads are made and why some threads were made in traditional Japan

Japanese Textile Workshop in Japan Information

Spring 2013 Indigo Workshop in Japan by

I was having a tough time pasting the pdf file onto blogger. My friend told me how to do it with this Scribd. It doesn't look right.

The May workshop looks as if it is full. (I have one space left but someone is waiting for vacation time to take it. I will know by Feb 1st if it is open.) The April workshop has a few spaces left after some members decided to postpone the workshop until autumn or spring 2014.

 I will be out of Japan in October 2013 giving indigo dyeing and silk thread making workshops in Canada. Therefore the autumn workshop will be in late autumn.

I have a few requests for a ten day to two week katazome and indigo and persimmon tannin dyeing (Traditional Japanese stencil dyeing) at the relatively cool farmhouse in August. Summer is very hot here and I don't want to be going into Tokyo and moving fast. If I hold the August Katazome workshop it will be slow paced. ( Those who know me are rolling their eyes.) I will put something up next month for this. If you are interested, drop me a line beforehand so I can incorporate your ideas into the curriculum.