Coming Soon to a Nose Near You!

A few weeks ago, I got the opportunity to sign up for an Arimatsu Shibori workshop that was made available to the exchange students and I leapt at the idea. Arimatsu Shibori is a traditional Japanese tie-dyeing technique that is based in the Arimatsu area of Nagoya. It involves tightly sewing or folding the material in certain ways and then dipping them into a boiling blue dye. Once dyed the material is unthreaded/unfolded to reveal a beautifully unique and often intricate pattern of blue and white. We were shown the techniques and history for both the sewing and folding techniques, though we only got to try the folding one (probably for the best tbh because it looked difficult af). We each had three pieces of material, each folded into a different type of triangle in advance which, in itself was a learning process. When we got to the dyeing step, we donned out gloves and, one by one, we dipped various corners and edges into the dye before taking it to a massive bath, untying it and washing it for what felt like forever. What was weird was that, when we dipped the material into the dye, it came out yellow, but as we washed it, it slowly transitioned to green and then eventually blue. It was so exciting to unfold each piece of material to see the pattern we had created and I was so surprised that not one piece came out the same!


When we got home with our drying strips of material, I started to wonder what to do with them. They were really stunning, but I didn't want them to sit around with no purpose, I cut each piece into three rough squares and took them to a seamstress to sew hems on them. The goal was to end up with nine handkerchiefs, three of each pattern, meaning that I could keep and use one of each pattern and give the remaining six to friends and family. I'm really pleased with how these turned out, and the material is really soft and lightweight, which makes it the perfect handkerchief!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shocking, I Know

Image
As I'm writing this, I'm actually working on a reflective essay for my uni, but it's got me thinking a little bit about culture shock. Prior to leaving for Japan, I was very anxious. I was told by lots of people that I would experience culture shock and, whilst that's totally ok, it was also something I should be prepared to experience. The truth is though, now that I think back, I don't think I ever really experienced culture shock. If you do a bit of reading online, you will quickly see that culture shock is usually broken down into stages ( thanks Wikipedia ): The Honeymoon Stage: Every little thing is amazing and exciting and life is as if you were looking through rose tinted glasses. You may remember this phase from your last relationship The Negotiation Stage:  The honeymoon period is over and all those little quirks that you used to love now kind of piss you off and remind you of how they were better back at home. This is the phase most commonly referre
Read more

E-I-E-I-O-M-G

Image
So this is a bit of a strange one. Since coming to Japan, I've obviously noticed a whole bunch of differences between here and old blighty. Some of them were to be expected, such as the food, some of them were a surprise, such as how cheap eating out is, some of them were not a big deal, such as the train/subway system, and some of them were totally random and unimportant and yet somehow completely threw me. This is a post about one of those things. Now the majority of the eastern world uses the Roman alphabet (a, b, c...) and whilst the order of these 26 letters is fairly arbitrary, we never really think about it. It also makes sense that the vowels follow the same alphabetical order. Now Japan doesn't use the Roman alphabet. Instead, it uses Kanji (Chinese characters representing words), Hiragana (a set of 46 syllables, or sounds, used to construct words), and Katakana (the same 46 syllables but with different characters, mostly used for foreign words). Hiragana and Katak
Read more

Got Wood 4: It Got Smaller Again

Image
Fresh off my door-sized print and inspired by my recent trip to the Nagoya City Science Museum (which kinda looks like that robot from The Incredibles), I decided to go a little outside my comfort zone by producing a three-colour print of a pattern (as opposed to any particular thing). I was still recovering from a pretty painful hand cramp and I was starting to worry about how I'd take all this work home, so I decided to go for a postcard-size print which, in hindsight, I think suits the design perfectly. Unsurprisingly, this print took no time at all to finish, and I made a total of eight, whimsical little prints that I am very pleased with. When I get back to England, I'd really like to go back to this design and reprint it with different colour combinations, it could make for an interesting series!
Read more