I join these two turtles—residents of the garden pond at Kyoto’s famous temple, Ryoanji—in wishing you all good things in 2009.

…and stay tuned for more postings throughout 2009.

You can call this a boro basket of sorts: what a gorgeous, rustic and wonderful-looking thing.  This is a woven basket which is covered with a random smattering of pieces of paper, applied in many, many layers and all held together with glue.  It measures 10″, 25 cm high by 11″, 28 cm in diameter.

The brown patina of the basket could very well be the result of the application of kaki shibu or green persimmon tannin.  Kaki shibu was used on myriad household and everyday items in old Japan, including umbrellas.  Kaki shibu gives a very distinctive, rich brown color and it is the same stuff applied to sakabukuro or the very collectible sake straining bags.

The form of the basket is a kind of loosely rendered and squat cylinder.  The shape of the lip, however, is irregular and its backward curve suggests that the basket beneath the papier mache may have originally been a burden basket or a hanging storage basket.

In keeping with the spirit of recycling and reuse, the backdrop for the basket in these photos is a trio of panels of  hand woven zanshi cotton, zanshi being a kind of cloth which is woven from the leftovers of spools of yarn.  Of the many varieties of Japanese folk textiles, zanshi ranks near the top of my personal favorites and I will be offering these pieces on my website in the near future.

I wrote an article on boro textiles, an abridged version of which has just been published in the English magazine, Modern Carpets & Textiles for Interiors, Winter 2008 issue.  The full version of the article will be coming out very soon in Hali, and I’ll make sure I post its publication here.

…but in the meantime, enjoy a tower of Darumas and one of the biggest temari you’ll ever see: it’s 9″ in diameter!  Enjoy Christmas and Hannukah, and see you soon…

My friend, Nao, in Kyoto, sent me these wonderful and mysterious indigo dyed cotton kasuri yarns: three bundles of weft yarns and three drums of their complementary warps.  I believe they may be the yarns used to make Kurume gasuri, the kind of ikat done in Kurume on Kyushu Island, but I’m not sure.  Not yet, at least.

Another good friend, Hiroko Takeda, a genius textile designer and weaver who lives nearby me in Brooklyn,  has been trained in the ‘folk textile’ traditions at Joshibi University in Tokyo.  Hiroko said she’ll come by one day and help me match weft yarns to the proper warps.  As Hiroko is expert in complex weaving techniques, I look forward to working with her on this as her feedback and insights will certainly be interesting.

I’m thrilled to own these ‘kasuri-in-the-raw’ yarns and I welcome any comments you may have.