Japan is a producer of hand-made textiles par excellence; my first introduction to them was traditional silk embroidery (nui-do, iirc); and then there's also temari and kumihimo, the former originating in Japan, the latter taken to superb heights.

Closeup of my first arashi effort. It's not at all regular, but I sure had a blast making it.

One other area they've developed to its highest pitch is shibori: a form of resist dying using bindings, such as string or clamped blocks. The so-called fawn-spot design is the most familiar, and highly revered because of its incredibly time-consuming technique.^[1] But the form of shibori that fascinated me the most was arashi (storm), the pole wrapping technique developed specifically to speed up production and make shibori more competitive.

the entire piece of fabric: Dyed 03nov2015. Cotton, 17.5 x 63inch

Recently I finally got around to trying it. I didn't attempt anything fancy, allowing the fabric to lap (fold), twist, etc as I wrapped it on the pole. My friend Page is taking a fabric dying class and she helped me a good deal:)

Closeup of a favourite section. I have no idea how I achieved it:)

Another, slower technique that I really like is the stitched moku-magane (wood-grain) pattern. This is best known in married metals, but is also applied to certain hand stitched resists. I wasn't as successful with this one:

Partial resist on fabric, 17x20 inches. Cotton, procion dye, 03nov15

But it was all just so much fun. We've had exceptionally warm weather, all the way into November, but I think more of this will have to wait till next year.^[2] In the meantime, however, I can plan. And if my decidedly amateurish efforts are at all inspiring, the book to learn all this stuff that I can heartily recommend is Shibori (and hey, the price has really dropped, too!)^[3]

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.