What a wonderful group of three heavily stitched and mended sakabukuro or the persimmon tannin dipped, cotton bags that were used to filter raw sake during the sake-making process.

I will be offering each of these for sale on my website this Wednesday, 6 January, starting 10 AM, New York time.

Before modern sake making techniques were widespread in Japan, probably during the first half of last century and earlier, crude sake, or sake lees, were poured into these bags which would be pressed to force out the filtered liquid.  Obviously the bags were used time and again and they suffered damage from use: this is the reason for of the intensive mending seen on these bags.

These three are really nice ones because of their mending; I had them stashed away for a while, but I just brought them out and decided to offer them for sale.

The bags on the left and right were constructed with machine stitching; the intensive. almost three-dimensional,  patching and stitching is all done by hand.

I hope you enjoy looking at these photos–and if any of these is of interest to you, check the New@Sri section of my website on or after January 6.

On my previous post, which you can see below this one, I showed textiles that were saturated in kaki shibu or green persimmon tannin.  I wrote about a set of six sakabukuro or sake straining bags, and I decided to follow that post by sharing more images of sakakuburo.

These are from my private collection and are really unusual for their patching—-which is really beautiful.

Although sakabukuro are generally mended with a distinctive stitch, they sometimes are patched with kaki shibu dyed fabric: this is the first time I’ve seen sakabukuro mended with cotton cloth, whose pale color is in wonderful contrast to the dark brown of the bag.

Really, really unusual; really, really beautiful.