FAQ - What do you do?

Customers often ask me what kind of sewing I do and they're often surprised that I don't  make kimonos, that I'm not a quilter and that I rarely sew with silk.  The truth is that I do very little sewing!  I'm usually kept busy enough preparing fabric for the shop - and being a mum. I never use a sewing machine unless I really really have to. My taste  and temperament leans very much towards more rustic handstitching.  I'm very interested in all traditional Japanese techniques for re-using and recycling old fabrics but I'm not good at all with little fiddly things (like the oshie in my previous post  for example). I love and appreciate so many of these traditional crafts  and I guess I could become better at that kind of work if I persevered, but it's not what I enjoy making.  Here are some pieces that show what I do enjoy.

I made the first pieces some years ago for an exhibition that my sewing group put on in the shop.

This is a sashiko furoshiki wrapping cloth that I use as a table cloth in the shop. It's about  60cm square and is stitched on  a piece of old futon cover.  Some years ago I found an article in a Japanese magazine about an old lady from Kyushu  who was doing the most amazing random freehand sashiko . I've seen very few other examples of it but I enjoy doing it myself and like how it looks.  These coasters and mats were also for the exhibition:

 

 

This is a silk komebukuro (rice bag) style drawstring  bag that I finished  recently. I had started it years ago and purposely left it unfinished for  komebukuro workshops. It's quite big ( a useful size for storing things) which made my husband comment that I couldn't really call a bag that size a  kombukuro. I like this style of working with random sized  strips.

 

 

This is the first, much smaller,  bag I made for the komebukuro workshop, using antique cottons.

 

 

This piece of patchwork is a detail from a quilt (it will be tied not actually quilted) that I've been working on for years and will eventually finish one day  - maybe. The squares are about 5 cm square but you can see that precision isn't really my thing! Again,  I like the randomness of it.

 

 

 

Lately I've started working on some traditional sashiko cotton hanafukin cloths for a potential workshop. These dishclothes were the kind of  stitching that women would sit and work on in the evenings to recycle their  cotton remnants. The one on the left is hitomezashi stitching  which is a kind of sashiko done in straight lines of vertical and horizontal running stitch on a grid. But again my taste is always to the more simple and I prefer the simple lines of the second one.

 





 

I haven't run any workshops for a few years now. We don't have very much space and as the shop got busier it became too difficult to run them  when we're open. I'm thinking of starting a limited programme again in the new year. One  of the workshops I'm working on is Ainu embroidery.  The Ainu are an indigenous people of northern Japan and I will post about Ainu textiles again in future.  I still have a lot of work to do to prepare for this workshop  -  my embroidery skills leave a lot to be desired. These are some of my  first attempts  - they don't have the same flare as original Ainu pieces - and please don't look too closely at the stitching!

 

 

 







 

 



FAQ... Japanese thimbles

One of the questions I'm most frequently asked in the shop is how to use the traditional Japanese ring type thimbles ( called yubinuki in Japanese)  The 'correct' answer is that it goes on your middle finger between the second and third knuckle and is used to push the needle through like this:*

But I think the best answer is that because they are so flexible you can use them however it suits your own stitching style. We have quite a few different types in the shop at the moment - including some old handstitched 'kaga yubinuki'. I particulary like the leather ones because they are soft and flexible. I often find customers with arthritis like them because they can fit over knobbly fingers. You can replace the thread if you want to make them looser.

Here are some old thimbles from my collection. They have traditionally been made from tiny  remnants of kimono fabric and silk thread. Some are just a simple piece of fabric stitched over a paper core, others are very finely and  beautifully embroidered.

These last few (as well as others in the previous photos) are 'Kaga yubinuki'  and feature this distinctive style of all over stitching which originated in Kaga (the old name for an area centred in Kanazawa and which  is now part of Ishikawa prefecture). Kaga had a long history as a textile producing area and so presumably had plenty of leftover threads for making thimbles...

*Illustration from John Marshall, 'Make Your  Own Japanese Clothes'