33cm circumference, 20/2 tencel weaving yarn

Moving from 32 to 92 faces

I thought I’d push my division line skills a bit by going beyond what I’m used to: 32 faces. The instructions on page 92 of Temari for Four Seasons vol.1 indicate that one divides up the pentagons into thirds and lays down five every-increasing pentagons around each of the twelve centres of a C10 division. The ‘magic number’ for a 33cm circumference ball is 5.8, which isn’t the easiest to divide evenly by six; measuring would have been simpler and more accurate if I’d gone for a 34cm circumference ball, with a ‘magic number’ of 6cm!

I wasn’t intending to stitch the ball – I simply wanted to see if I could lay down the division lines and come up with something visual coherent. No love lost if I got lost and had to rip out the divisions lines. I’ve become used to laying down 20/2 tencel, a shiny weaving yarn, as a substitute metallic thread and in this case it held its position reasonably well and I only needed to tack after laying down the initial C10 division lines. I’m not sure that additional tacking would serve any useful purpose or not as opposed to nudging as you add a stitching thread. More tacking would be required on a larger ball.

Experimenting with stitching

I’ve started to outline some of the hexagons around the central pentagon of one of the C10 pentagons using 20/2 tencel weaving yarn in other colours. The obvious contenders of stitching are either going around the outside of shapes or kiku within shapes or some continuous line stitching; Temari for Four Seasons vol.1 shows the latter on a 48cm circumference mari in two stitch colours (pp.92-93). Interlocking shapes on such a small ball as here tended to loosen the division lines. I might experiment with different thread types to see what’s possible. This might simply remain a sample 92-face ball, with different stitching patterns and different threads around the ball.

In the meantime, I can now more confidently go and look around and see how others have tackled 92 faces, especially concerning what metallic threads are suitable (obviously thin and crisp are appropriate) and what stitching thread types are suitable. Even a different, finer needle might be required.

27cm circumference, pearl cotton 5

With increasing fluency with C10s, there’s an inevitable desire to upgrade from 32 faces to 42 and more. I am resisting that in the current run of Complex 10 division balls, instead sticking with 32 face C10s to consolidate skills and not jumping too far ahead too fast.

Here’s one from Kiyoko Urata and Mayo Shimazaki’s Elegant Temari book (colour photo page 5 and a verbal description on page 47). I thought I’d return to a colour scheme I used recently: red, yellow and black & white. One of two photographed in Urata & Shimazaki’s book is black-and-white; I have to say that personally I seem to resist making temari without colour. Given the pattern uses two components, nejiri/interlocked triangles and irregularly-shaped large hexagons, I decided not to create the visual illusion of combining them, but to differentiate the components using colour. I think the key in this design is to have a near-black mari, giving the illusion of the surface design floating in space – so mine are on a dark red mari  with red-purple pearl cotton 5 division lines so as not to draw attention to any colour shifts where the large hexagons meet. The colours end up being analagous on the colour wheel: red-purple, dark red, pink, yellow, all with a contrasting black-and-white.

Spoiler alert!

Avert your eyes at this point if you want to tackle this one by yourself.  By all means, come back here if you get stuck.

What I found interesting was that I didn’t need to use pins or measurements in the surface stitching. I did the interlocked triangles first, taking them up to a half-way point (visually). Each of the sides of the triangle has to cross its “kite” of division lines lying on the mari exactly perpendicularly. This allowed me to stitch to the seams in yellow and pink without pins or measuring. The key to the bands is to stay parallel with the division lines throughout. In the past, I think I would have stitched one row of triangles followed by one row of hexagons.

Urata and Shimazaki have been very particular with their final single row of yellow next to the division lines. The difference that creates is huge: it “calms” down the ball a lot. Moving from white to yellow to pink to dark red is quite fierce by comparison.

It is possible to keep stitching right up to the division line seams and create a strong sense of an ‘all-over’ design. At the moment, I’m keen on “almost-all-over” designs: covering a lot of the ball, but still with the relaxed state of mind about not having to go right to the seam, being content with some of the background mari showing.

Consequences

It’s possible to stitch the yellow-pink triangles as a renzoku or single stitch, round and round the centre of top and bottom pentagons, creating an ever so slight difference in the final result. But that’s another story, or rather, another ball!

23cm circumference, pearl cotton 5

Fearlessness is a personal quality everyone working in Japanese textiles needs: fearlessness standing before the indigo dyepot, applying dye to cloth and trusting in one’s skill while taking risks, fearlessness braiding from your own ayagaki pattern, fearlessness tackling the design of a new temari ball. With this sense of almost overweaning self-belief, I’ve tackled a C8 version of a C10 ball found in one of the Japanese temari books. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to stitch C8 versions of any C10s I attempt. One of my other New Year’s resolutions is to tackle (fearlessly) temari balls from photos alone, where no instructions or guides are provided.

This is my prototype or test run for one shown in Kiyoko Urata and Mayo Shimazaki’s Elegant Temari (Naniwa temari no miyako temari) (ISBN 4837706959), colour photo on p.19. Judging from those on the same page, it’s probably around 26-28cm circumference, gold jiwari on a maroon (red with black added) mari, stitch colours in white, red (a tone involving red plus grey) and a complementary green (a tone of green-yellow plus grey). The pink/red and green must not be too close tonally to the background maroon/burgundy, eitherwise the crisp colour edges will be lost.

I really like this combination of dark red/jade or pale olive green; I’m a sucker for sang de boeuf or burgundy from my studio pottery days. It’s a stupendous glaze colour, especially against jade on porcelain. There is a beaded jewellery person in Perth, Western Australia, whose trademark colours are a similar dark purple and green grape colour. These colours need to be very carefully matched – from the temari below, you can see where I’ve erred by adding traffic light red to a mix of burgundy and yellow-green – this I need to avoid!

Spoiler alert!

Perhaps you have the Elegant Temari book handy. If not, I’ll stitch the C10 later and you can see how I went. The Japanese artists seem to have stitched theirs using Kyo rayon thread, giving it a lustrous vitality. I doodled how the C10 might be constructed. I’ve not seen it discussed or photographed anywhere, so here’s how I think it goes:

Step 1 is to stitch double-threaded the white/pink-red kiku flowers at the centre of each pentagon. Step 2 is a single row of green around the stars (best done renzoku or continuously around the ball).  Step 3 is the band, double-threaded, of green passing over the single green row and clipping the ends of the red stars, again best done renzoku or continuously around the ball. This has a remarkable functional purpose, in addition to anything aesthetic: it holds down the single green rows in place (which you’ll note are sitting exposed at the corners of each large pentagon) as well as securing the ends of the kiku stars. Importantly too, it doesn’t interfere with the stitching of the diamonds in the next step. Step 4 is the diamonds, single-threaded, in green.

the Sanada cord, a turtle

starts crying¹

- Yamao Tamamo

I first came across Sanada-himo in 2003 at the gallery shop of the Kyoto Traditional Arts & Crafts Museum. There were examples of sanada-himo alongside kumihimo braiding with the characteristics of both standard warp-weft handweaving and the flat, long characteristics of kumihimo.

Here’s a photo of kumihimo and sanadahimo braids in modern guises (luggage identifiers, mobile phone cords, hair clips) purchased at the Kyoto Traditional Arts & Crafts Museum shop. From left the sanada-himo examples are the first, sixth and seventh, the rest being kumihimo (takadai braiding stand, #2, kakudai #3-5 and marudai #8):

During 2007, while taking a walk up the steep hill towards the popular Kiyomizudera Temple in Kyoto, in amongst the numerous souvenir stalls I came upon a shop that sold sanada-himo by the length, presumably catering to tea masters, tea schools, temples, shrines and art collectors. By this time, I’d ascertained that it wasn’t kumihimo braiding per se, but standard warp-weft weaving on a small, narrow scale. Sanada-himo ‘ribbons’ are much used in Japan to secure the lids to the ubiquitous traditional wooden boxes containing tea cups and other valuables. These wooden boxes offer some protection against damage by earthquakes and are convenient both in terms of transport and storage of small items. I bought two small lengths for 300Y/$US5 each. Each is a 2-metre lengths, with a standard width of 12mm, the central design being 3-4mm wide. In terms of colour, the one on the left is a blue with a greenish tinge, with a cream central design; the one at right, is a dark navy blue/black with a central design of orange and blue-grey with an outline in red.

To put sanada-himo in context, here’s a photograph of one wrapped around a wooden box containing a tea cup (chawan) from the Japanese tea ceremony. You’ll notice that there’s a slit in the bottom of the box to allow for the sanada-himo tape to pass around without scuffing or affecting the balance of the box. The third photo shows the chawan inside the box, wrapped in its own silk bag with braided cord (braided on a marudai or kakudai braiding stand – an extremely simple braid structure because elegant simplicity is prized in the tea ceremony) – outside the box is the tiny ceramic tea-caddy, with its ivory (these days resin) lid, again wrapped in its own silk bag with braided cord. The braids were often tied in very elaborate knots. Sometimes those knots were a family secret or tradition so that the owner of the very valuable ceramic utensils or the even more expensive tea could be security-packaged by its owner. Any potential thief would have to know the secret method of tying the braided cord!

History; sanada-himo vs sageo

In many Japanese textile traditions, there are two options when it comes to historical origins. Either the tradition came from China or it was entirely homegrown, the former explanation being part of the cultural homage to China (and perhaps a throwback to the centuries when Japan suffered a “cultural cringe” because everything of value seemed to come from that country) and the latter being part of the Japanese ‘independent’ thought or nationalism, that significant innovations or inventions must be the product of the Japanese mind. We see this with kumihimo and temari, for example. As a rule, I never discuss historical origins with the Japanese – ascribing their tradition to the Chinese could verge on a diplomatic incident. Part of the problem too is that the Shosoin Treasury of ‘Japanese’ textiles in Nara, the foundation stone of all things textile in Japan, is a mix of homegrown textiles and tribute textiles from the court of China from the 8th century; the experts are in constant dispute about which textile came from which country. Some Japanese experts have re-created Shosoin textiles using traditional Chinese methods, which surely doesn’t go down too well with the Japanese. Unsurprisingly then, there are two explanations of this type when it comes to the historical origins of sanada-himo.

Some say the flat woven cord technique is said to have originated in China, specifically Tibet (sanaaru) and come to Japan via the Silk Road around the 9^th or 10^th century (Heian Period); thereafter it was known as “small weaving” (sa-no-hata), which was later changed to sanada. Closer to home, others say it can be traced back to Yayoi Period (300BC-300AD) patterning, when textiles were pressed into clay to create surface patterning. Sanada-himo is also been identified with the well-known Sengoku Period 16th century samurai warrior, Masayuki Sanada and his family, who used this cord to wrap around his sword handle. The cord was sold in the town of Sakai (now a suburb of Osaka) as Sanada-no-himo.

While sword handles were also wrapped with braided cords (sageo), the woven sort graduated into the tea ceremony as supported by samurai where it took on the life as “samurai ribbon”, used as an all-purpose wrapping or tying cord for utensil boxes made from paulownia wood. The distinction between sageo and sanada-himo is blurred these days; by their very nature, sanada-himo will be very thin, while sageo will be thicker or even rounder in shape.

Here’s a photo of samurai swords on show at the Osaka City Museum.The top shows the blade only, the lower one showing the sageo braided cord in place with the blade sheathed in its lacquered case. The sageo was used to secure the sword to the warrior’s waist.

A five-metre length of sanada-himo is said to take a month to weave by hand. Obviously for use with samurai weaponry, the tight weave provides the tape with strength.

Dyeing

Sanada-himo is traditionally made from natural dyes: brown from the Japanese chestnut, yellow from Cape Jasmine, red from safflower, purple from gromwell root, in total around 70 plant species.

Modern manufacture

Orimoto Sumiya Co. Ltd. (www.sanadahimo.com) defines sanada-himo as a traditional textile originated from the Sanada family. The sanada-himo was and is still made of cotton, though silk is often mixed with cotton in manufacture for items relating to tea ceremony. Sumiya started business in 1928 and move from Kaga City, Ishikawa to Kanazawa in 2008. They use terms such as “shouken”, “kaganishiki” (Kaga City brocade), “fukuro” (wrapping) and “hirahimo” (flat braid) to distinguish between cotton and silklon (silk and nylon presumably), all-cotton, and double-woven and plain weave varieties.

Apparently the technique of sanada-himo developed into a weaving style (sanada-ori) and also applied to making obi, hence the term sanada-obi. It is used as bands for traditional wooden geta sandals (sanada-uchi), wristwatch bands, belts, dog leashes and bag handles.

While individuals might have their own designs created, there is a wide range of so-called “public” patterns available to anyone.

Weaving your own

I’m not aware of anyone copying traditional sanada-himo in the West by hand. Obviously it’s within reach of a handweaver familiar with warp-faced weaving. Theoretically braiders can braid it either on the ayatakadai stand which allows for perpendicular warp to weft ‘weaving’. The same goes for a karakumidai braiding stand.

References

See history and tubular manufacture to facilitate cutting trimming ends at http://www.gokotea.com/kb_results.asp?ID=5.

See a variety of surface design patterns, associated with sanada-himo as sword sageo used in iaido (swordplay art) at http://www.tozandoshop.com/Kyoto_Sanada_Himo_Sageo_p/000-sd[1].htm.

The crowds follow a set route, more or less in reverential silence, filing through one gate and leaving by another and skirting around the Imperial palace buildings in between. The thing that struck me most was how immaculate the building and grounds were: one gets used to a certain high standard of temple maintenance sponsored by Japanese corporations, but the Imperial Household Agency’s work is a cut above. When I visited, there were several short dance performances during the day; I notice in 2009, the Palace was opened for ten days to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the accession of the current Emperor, and that featured performances of Heian Period “football” or “soccer”, known as kemari (and familiar to temari stitchers because the “te” or hand or temari is said to have originated from the “ke” or foot of kemari/football).

Here are photos I took specifically of the outdoor performance of gagaku in Autumn 2007. While being a foreigner I was reasonably tall enough to take the photos, but plainly not close enough. I took the photos not so much for the gagaku music (specifically bugaku dancing) but for the historic costumes. The historic costumes bear all the hallmarks of the Heian Period (794-1185): silk, mandala circle surface designs, free-flowing outer robes, horse-hair hats).  

The dancers on the stage, set under a covered portico, all wore red silk fabric with gold designs. Note the master-of-ceremonies, dressed in green silk,  with microphone beside the stage.

Here are the gagaku dancers again, but note the line of imperial musicians in their black horse-hair caps on the ground (in the middle ground, past the audience members with their baseball caps). The black horse-hair caps are reminiscent of Korean headgear.

Here the court orchestra is again lined up, with their flutes, drums and Sho wooden mouth-organ:

In this photo, taken at the end of the performance, the musicians are at left (green/orange silk with mandalas) and the dancers are at right (a design of vertical swirling ‘spiritual vapours’ around 4 mandalas)

.

The Emperor moved to Tokyo in 1868. It’s said that some Kyotoites are still waiting for him to take up residence again, one day, in Kyoto.

References

For a photo of the 2009 kemari game, see http://japanvisitor.blogspot.com.au/2009/11/kyoto-imperial-palace-special-opening.html

For background on gagaku, see http://www.kunaicho.go.jp/e-culture/gagaku.html

The pattern is Makiko Tada’s; the hand movement annotations are mine.

Pine and bamboo are popular among the Japanese because as evergreens they have come to symbolise steadfastness – pine rather gloriously connoting “unflinching purpose and vigorous old age” according to Japanese Gardens, an online handbook. Plums, pines and bamboo (the Three Friends of Winter) are auspicious, going by the Chinese name sho-chiku-bai, and are found in e-gasari ikat weaving (as explained by Moeller) and in traditional Japanese embroidery. Historically, the rise of Japanese confidence and independence from the 8^th century Nara Period onwards was reflected in the arts and crafts in a move away from the heavy Chinese influence. Such things as cherry blossoms and pines replaced Chinese flowers. Certainly the texture of pine bark as a geometric pattern is reproduced by marudai braiders.

Live pine vegetation, as clipped sections of pine trees, are represented in Japanese textiles as bumpy half-circles resembling, to this Westerner, mushrooms. The penny fell when I stopped to admire the branches of manicured pine trees outside Osaka Castle in the autumn of 2007 and recognised these “bumps” as sections of pine tree vegetation. It turns out these dense pine branches are called “kasamatsu” or “cloud pruning”.

On kumihimo braids

It took me ages to work out what these abstracted, three-pointed scratchings were when I first saw them in Makiko Tada’s braiding book devoted to double-layer takadai braids. They are of course dried pine needles or pine straw and are an obvious motif for Winter among the Japanese. Makiko Tada braids them as white on a maroon background and they come without instructions; I’ve drafted the bobbin movements, as above, but have yet to braid it. I’m still deciding on an appropriate colour scheme. I’ve noticed on a website a link between pine straw and bad luck, a conclusion drawn from their presence in an important Noh play. I think it’s really odd that someone would suggest mothers embroider symbols of bad luck on gifts for their daughters, or that women would encircle their bellies with an obijime braid with this design. It also contradicts its presence (whether alive as green pine needles or dead as pine straw) linked to that other symbol of fidelity and longevity, the crane. I can only think this is a mis-reading of the Noh play and that pine straw is simply a Winter symbol.

On temari balls

Temari stitchers spend a lot of time and effort translating traditional Japanese design motifs to the rounded surface of a ball. Cranes, bamboo branches, tortoises, fans are all represented on temari. Temari stitchers like to imitate other Japanese textiles by including sashiko stitching in the form of areas of asanoha or hemp-leaf design. With attention turning to TAST 2012 weekly embroidery stitches (Week 1 was the fly stitch), I thought I’d note how temari stitchers have approached pine needles/pine straw and then decide which I should emulate.

There also exists in temari a matsuba kagari or “pine needle stitch” (matsu being pine). In the West, we refer to this as starbursts for fireworks, which it resembles of course. For the Japanese, it’s the pointy ends of the ‘pine needles’ which matter, not the fireworks coming out of the centre. See www.temarikai.com, Pattern 1104/page 10, though for a more comprehensive treatment of the stitch, see http://temarimath.info (‘Let’s talk about starbursts”, September 2011). I also recommend Takahara’s book, Flower Temari Beginner’s Course, page 19 (note especially the stitching on the left for those straight-stitched ‘petalled’ flowers, e.g. p.63).

While the starbursts derive more obviously from the larch tree, pine straw can be seen in somewhat random position on a temari ball in Ozaki, Cosmo 7 (colour photo 6, instructions pp.40-41), I have seen them placed evenly around the sides of a pentagon, as a white-on-blue design on Japanese printed fabric, in the style of a traditional heraldic design.

In one of Ozaki’s Lovely Temari designs for cranes, the obi looks like a series of (live) pine needles, wrapped together so they resemble greeting noshi.

Pine is linked with cranes in the two of the most recent temari books: Ozaki, ISBN-9784837701101, page 2 ball 2, instructions 48-49 – here as cloudburst topiary, and Kanke, Tomita, Shikina & Toyoda ISBN 978-4-8377-0199-6, page 13 ball 2, instructions  pp.68-69 – here as free-embroidered pine straw.

 
References

Dusenbury, Mary M.  Flowers, Dragons and Pine Trees: Asian Textiles in the Spencer Museum of Art (Manchester, Hudson Hills Press, 2004).

Moeller, Ann Marie. Prosperity, Longevity and “Happily Ever-After”: Symbolism and the Sophistication of Implication in Japanese E-gasuri (picture ikat) Textiles. Proceedings of the Textile Society of America Symposium, Sept.2008.

http://greygoat.limewebs.com/kimonomotifsplants.html. Ruby Kimono differentiates clearly between kasamatsu and matsuba pine needles.

http://www.japanesegardensonline.com/Site/Quintessential_flora.html. Japanese Gardens, an online handbook. A marvellously comprehensive description of all things ‘pine’!

http://www.pintangle.com/ TAST 2012.

31cm circumference, pearl cotton 5

Following on from yesterday’s temari, today’s has developed out of some doodles, as follows:

Here’s the first row completed, which is quite close to yesterday’s original #100702 by Debi, but with a tiny difference of my own significant enough for me to pursue stitching. Today I will stitch three rows, as yesterday, but  stitch the rows closer to the division lines than yesterday’s. As a result, I am less concerned about the proportion of mari background showing through. At this stage, I’m not sure what other colours or surface design components I can add, but I’m looking for an additional pentagon or triangle.

In terms of colour, I started with a light violet mari and a light blue 2/20 tencel weaving thread as jiwari, with a mid-red/orange thread as a complementary.

Once the three rows of orange were in place, I was able to pick out pentagons to stitch round.

I ended going overboard with yellow, violet, green and dark brown-green to finish. The colours had some logic to them: they are form a split complementary: violet and yellow (reinforced at the flower’s centre) with colours on either side of yellow on the spectrum (green, yellow-green and yellow-orabnge).

I am rushing these photos into print somewhat; what should happen between finishing and photographing is extensive grooming of all threads, ideally with a tekobari but otherwise with the eye-end of a needle.

31.5cm circumference, pearl cotton 5

With the prospect of another big year of university study ahead of me, I imagine I will be going on several intermittent temari/braiding jags as in 2011: one now before Semester 1 starts, a second in mid-Winter after Sem1 exams and again next December when the year is done. Temari-stitching ought to be more or less continuous; picking it up after an absence has its problems. It’s at these respite times during the year though that I review what colleagues have been doing and I try to “catch up”. Herding is big on the Internet (Yahoo! Groups, let alone Facebook) but I tend to tag along away down the back of the pack somewhere. 

I’m reviving Complex 10/C10 skills just at the moment: laying down division lines, tacking them efficiently, noting “natural” efficiencies such as jump stitches, single stitch renzoku, etc. All these little things improve very gradually over time. The first goes are very raw, but one mellows.

Continuous Motif

I’ve noted simple triangle shapes within pentagons (e.g. Temarikai Pattern 072) and more complex stitching linking pentagons (e.g. Temarikai Pattern 061), but since colleagues have been busy lately discussing ‘continuous’ stitches, I thought I’d have a go at an “innie” (a motif running around inside a pentagon, worked as a continuous stitch) as described over at http://temarimath.info, Item 100702. Debi discussed this in her blog on 10 October 2011, which gives you some indication of how slowly these ideas germinate here. I will progress either to an ‘outie’ (the motif moving outside pentagons) or some independent doodling of my own, as she recommends.

Colour considerations

I thought I’d simplify things visually by not using ungen, graded colour, but simply “bands”. Not even blacked-edged bands. I’ve gone back to reading Hideaki Chijiwa’s Color Harmony: A Guide to Creative Color Combinations, who says to (1) be aware of a general all-over colour (e.g. my temari as pictured in Photo 1 below is “brown”, despite the presence of blue and yellow); (2) don’t use more than two or three colours, five is too many and (3) have an accent colour (here my yellow) on a dull background (my brown mari with blue jiwari).  I am having some real problems with Chijiwa’s advice, but will take it slowly; see my future posts devoted to colour.

Let me say that I regretted using blue thread (2/20 tencel) over the brown mari and regretted even more laying down a single row of yellow! But having slept on it, it works.

Photo 1. Like the way this turned out – will return to Chijiwa’s book to work out why

I had in mind just three plain colours – yellow, green and violet, all mid colours, nothing very brash. Yellow as the main colour (because of the high tonal contrast with the mari), violet (because I think it might work on the yellow as its background) and green (because I have this notion that I am stitching flowers and it will form some sort of vegetation background). Probably three rows max; unlike Debi’s I want some mari colour to show through a bit more).

As seen in Photo 2 below, I followed the outline of the division lines in white and overlaid the violet pentagon, without interlocking it around the continuous motif. By this time, the pale blue 2/20 tencel used for the division lines had morphed into a dark blue/green against the neighbouring colours. Because the flower petals were interlocking, it didn’t make sense to upset the balance by adding a triangle as envisaged. You’ll notice perhaps that in stitching the yellow rows, I mixed interlocking with layering; by rights, it should be one or the other.

Photo 2. White pentagons stitched under the yellow, then violet over the yellow.

The end result called to mind lantana, an Australian plant (declared a Weed of National Signifiance). The variation in the colours of the lantana flowers give rise to the idea of varying the colours of the flower petals across the large pentagons.

I’m happy that I managed some plain-looking “bands”, all of three rows each (helping to create unity across the ball), a layered-band look with “equal” amounts of background mari showing throughout.

The Iroha ‘poem’

Kana characters “ni-ho-he”; page 2 of 20; the braid pattern is Yayoi Miura’s , the handwritten notes detailing the hand movements and placement of bobbins through the threads are mine

My braided ‘Iroha”, right-side up (blue-on-white); the reverse shows the characters in reverse (white-on-blue); about an inch wide

It’s mid-summer here in Australia at the moment and sometimes to take my mind off the fierce heat at this time of year, I throw myself into a textile project. Last year, I put my temari aside and stitched biscornu, for the sake of something completely different. Braiding the Iroha poem is indelibly imprinted on my mind as being associated with four or five days of non-stop braiding, probably around New Year in 2005 or 2006, I can’t remember which. All I can remember is that it was braided in the crucible of extreme heat.

I posted information on braiding this listing of traditional kana characters known as Iroha back in 2009. The sequence of all the ‘letters’ in the Japanese ‘alphabet’ (not dissimilar to “The quick brown fox…” in English) is also a poem in its own right in Japan and has been adapted to braiding on the takadai stand by Yayoi Miura.  The kana characters themselves are written somewhat informally, in a grass style of Kietsu Gire (Edo Period, 1600-1868) but anyone who has studied formal Japanese kana characters will recognise the braided forms relatively easily.

Miura-san provides the look of the characters; the braider has to create their own braiding sequence (see my pencilled notes on the two side panels). They are in pencil so I can quickly fix up any errors. Bascially there are just two Japanese characters used, ue (up) and shita (down) reflecting which threads have to be lifted or pushed down as the bobbin passes through.

Ogura Hyakunin Isshu

The first kanji characters of poem 26, page 1 of 10; the braid pattern is Yayoi Miura’s , the handwritten notes detailing the hand movements and placement of bobbins through the threads are mine

Beyond merely listing the characters of the Japanese ’alphabet’, there is the business of braiding poetry. Following in the footsteps of Yayoi Miura and her colleagues, who braided all 100 of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, a famous collection of poems, I braided just one, #26. I did this by way of preparation for the first International Braiding Conference in 2007 – the second is coming up mid-2012 in Manchester UK. I shan’t be attending the Manchester Conference, but I’m certainly thinking about braiding at the moment; prospective conference participants are surely busy at their braiding stands as we speak! I received a lovely compliment recently on my Iroha braid, but I see I haven’t posted before my efforts with the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu. I was so intimidated by the 2007 Conference exhibition with so many stupendous examples done in silk, I’ve barely touched my takadai loom since, but I will braid this poem or another some day.

Braid Structure: Double-layer pickup.

Source: Poem 26. Yayoi Miura, website www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~kumihimo

Materials: 2/20 Tencel – red and silver. 4 strands per bobbin. Sourced from Marg Coe, USA.

Equipment: Braidershand takadai. 68 bobbins, 100gm. Standard 16/17/18/17 bobbins on arms, left to right.

Commentary

Materials. I like to use 4 strands per bobbin. Any fewer with this heaviness of bobbin and the braid becomes too taut. Examples in Japan are done in silk and are somewhat thinner than my example.

Technique.  Since there are no torii edge weaving stitches, the braiding is relatively straight-forward.

Pattern. Mrs Miura’s website complements the published work of Makiko Tada and Rodrick Owen very nicely since she presents a very wide range of very simple plant, insect, animla and other motifs suitable for double-layer pickup braiding, destined for end decoration on obijime. She and her colleagues have moved beyong the usual obijime context to braiding a famous collection of Japanese poems – the 100 Poems by 100 Poets (Ogura Hyakunin Isshu); the collection sports its own interpretative museum in north-west Kyoto, near Arashiyama, called the Shiguraden. I had the opportunity of visiting the museum in 2007; it’s not particularly kind to foreigners who don’t speak Japanese (there are a lot of electronic games for kids) but I’m not aware of too many museums established to celebrate and honour a poetry anthology. Mrs Miura has published a lavish monograph featuring colour plates of each of the braids with accompanying graphed designs (ayagaki) for braiders. The exhibition of the the International Braiding Conference in Kyoto, November 2007, had many examples of braided poems on show – of the long, continuous type (i.e. one long braid wiht a substantial space at the top and bottom of the braid – the poem is located in the bottom 2/3 of the braid). Miura, by contrast, presents the poem as it would traditionally appear on paper, in several lines from right to left. Here the braid is cut up and set behind glass like any Western painting. The poems are often braided on a ‘background’ of delicately-shaded colour, what we would call space-deyed but which the Japanese have formalised (Jacqui Carey, UK, used to sell these pre-dyed lengths of silk ready to braid). The background shading as well as the lower-level colour for the kanji are obviously closely linked to the emotion and content of each of the poems.

A translation by Teishin Ko of the original poem by Fujiwara no Tadahira (in praise of Autumn) is as follows:

Ogurayama

Mine no momijiba

Kokoro araba

Ima hitotabi no

Miuki matanan

If the maple leaves

On Ogura Mountain

Could only have hearts,

They would longingly await

The emperor’s pilgrimage.

I’ll post a photo of the finished braid in due course.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyakunin_Isshu - includes some additional information about Poem 26

http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~kumihimo/ Yayoi Miura’s website

Tada, Makiko. Comprehensive Treatise of Braids V: Taka-dai braids 3. Double-layer takadai braids. 

Owen, Rodrick. Making Kumihimo: Japanese Interlaced Braids. Double-layer takadai braids.

Temari

This is photo of yesterday’s temari stitching: pattern 0601 by Ginny Thompson from www.temarikai.com. Mine is 32cm circumference, on a Old Gold Yellow mari with green pearl cotton 5 for the jiwari division lines. In response to a friend’s criticism that my stitching thread colours are too bright, I opted for beige DMC 842, rose DMC 316, dark brown DMC 611 and pink DMC 316. The pattern warns about taking special care with colour choices and with stitching in between previously stitched rows. I’ve stopped here and will redo completely in a day or two, altering the colour scheme and making improvements to the stitching. Pattern 0601 as stitched has a lot of background mari showing through. 

Kakudai braid

There is a shop in north-west Kyoto, past Arashiyama and the renowned bamboo forest there, which stocks kumihimo braids made up as hairclips and functional ornaments. There are thousands on the shelves, in the most wondrous colours. One of course would buy four examples, one for each season.  This one obviously involves silk in four colours (red, maroon, dark green and a gold-ochre – for Summer?), braided on a kakudai braiding stand. After an inch of braiding four braids, one in each colour (an 8-way braid for each?), red silk (identical to the red of the braid) is then wrapped around the four braids to tighten them together. Then the colours are wrapped around each other in a four-way braid to form two central bumps, again wrapped in the middle and at the end of the bump with red silk, then each colour is braided separately to finish. You have the aesthetic of compression-and-release, the contrast between a tight braid and its looser cousin. The segments are cut into 3″/8cm lengths then super-glued into metal clip blanks. The metal blanks of the clips are of the highest quality; a quality I’ve never seen outside Japan.

I bought this in 2007 and though it doesn’t receive any daily use, the silk threads aren’t falling apart or fading. I mention that because silk will inevitably deteriorate (especially in a humid, maritime climate like Japan’s). I notice some discussion recently about deterioriation over time of styrofoam balls used for temari bases. Of course there are no foolproof ways of temari (or kumihimo) lasting forever and ever. Japanese textiles from the lowliest temari to the most sophisticated kimono are highly unlikely to last a generation or two; only in the most exceptional circumstances do we have extant examples of textiles from ancient times – only extremely sophisticated laboratory-like conditions permit this: imperial guard (as in the case of the textile treasury in Nara) or being locked up in tombs or bronze Buddha statues (historic temple braids). We go to museums and think we are seeing medieval kimono: we are actually looking at modern copies. Museums have even been known to copy National Treasures for public display, while the original is locked away in a vault. And why not, especially when kudos go to anyone who can copy so convincingly something great and fantastic? Like the Shinto complex at Isa, the Japanese are bent on copying examples from the past, over and over. We in the West value innovation and novelty – one-offs – , the Japanese instead value copying and re-creating. The Japanese are more intent on passing on traditions from one person or generation to the next, rather than inventing new patterns for their own sake. Of course they participate in the Western paradigm of craft book publishing and they have come very late to the world of professional museology. They are willing participants in their much-beloved competitive hierarchy of competency achievement (craft certification, levels and testing, etc.), but ultimately their deep-down love is to perpetuate their traditions. In a world of impermanence, decay and loss, all we have in the end is each other as human beings – not things.