When we arrived in Kyoto via the bullet train from Mt. Fuji, our first stop was Marumasu Nishimuray where we were treated to a class in Yuzen dye painting.
This is the description in Japanese and English. I’ll include a portion here since it’s a bit hard to read above:
“KYO-YUZEN (Textile dyeing) is a method of textile dyeing which has been practiced since the 8th century. The creation of hand-drawn yuzen is attributed to a craftsman named Miyazaki Yusensai who was active in the latter half of the 17th century. The complex skills involved in this dyeing method have been handed down the generations to create patterns of wonderful polychrome brilliance. Kyo-Yuzen patterns may either be drawn freely by hand or dyed employing stencils.”
And here I am pinning my first of three stencils in place:
The teacher was very easy to understand and we were anxious to begin.
We dipped the hand made brushes into the beautiful colored dyes and began to paint,
keeping the brush vertical and using short circular strokes.
This is one of the two paintings I created. I framed it after returning home, and it’s ready to be put into my Japanese memory quilt.
The next day after visiting with Mr. Takeda, we walked down the street of Arimatsu Town to the Narumi Shiborikaikan (tie-dyeing museum) for another great class!
The supplies were waiting for us in the classroom on the second floor and Quiltanna couldn’t resist jumping right in:
None of the teachers spoke English, but they had all been doing this for a very long time. We used a running stitch along the lines of the printed “handkerchief”, and everyone caught on fast.
By the smiles I think we were all ready to do some stitching.
And Jim kept up well!
Once the stitching was done we addressed envelopes with the same number that was attached to our “hankerchiefs”:
And put them into the color box of our choice to be dyed and mailed home to us after the trip.
It was exciting to watch our mailboxes and receive our pieces a few weeks later!
One of the teachers was really taken with Quiltanna and asked to have our photo taken together. I was delighted! Making friends in other parts of the world is such a blessing!
My green flower will also be a part of the memory quilt I’m working on, but I’m afraid that memory quilt will take me a lot longer to make than it took this block to arrive from Japan.
Each class we experienced was educational and fun, and my favorite class is still to come. Next week Roketsu dyeing!
[…] plan was to take the pieces I made in our classes in Japan, along with a few of my purchases while there, and combine them with this background to make a […]