In a past blog I’ve shown a glimpse of this wonderful cloth, but today I decided to talk about it a little bit.  It is a length of hand spun, hand woven cotton that has been dyed using the itajime or kyokechi method, a technique where carved boards are employed to resist dye and to imprint designs onto cloth.

Itajime is a complex process because the boards used to dye the cloth are intricately carved–you can see a blog entry where I show the boards here.  Essentially, many pairs of boards are carved with designs in mirror image; cloth is fed in between the boards and the result is a stack of carved boards, face-to-face with a bolt of cloth interwoven between them.  Pressure is applied to the stack of compressed cloth, the block of boards and cloth are dipped in a dye bath, and where there was pressure on the cloth, no dye can penetrate, the result being a resist dyed image.

Or, the carved blocks can be made in such a way as to both resist AND to let in dye, which yields a “positive” image, such as the crows we see here.  The background is resisted according to the first method described, and the pattern of the background is the well-used hemp leaf pattern or asa no ha.

 The crows are beautifully–and efficiently–rendered.

This cloth was made in Izumo, Japan, where there was great activity surrounding itajime or kyokechi dyeing.  Likely it dates to the late nineteenth century.

Beautiful, isn’t it?