Worked out by a twelve-year-old girl who was looking at a worn-out cloth.
Around 1800 a girl in Kurume named Inoue Den unpicked an old indigo garment and noticed that where it had worn, the thread showed white in flecks. She reasoned backwards: if you could put those white flecks into the thread on purpose, before weaving, the pattern would appear as the cloth came off the loom.
That is what kasuri is. The thread is bound in bundles where the pattern must stay white, dyed in indigo, unbound, and then woven so the white marks line up. They never line up exactly. The soft blurred edge — kasure — is not a fault; it is the reason people buy it.
Bundles of thread are bound tight where the pattern must stay white.
Dipped in indigo again and again. The bound places never take the dye.
The bindings come off and the thread is now blue with white gaps.
Woven so the white gaps meet. They never meet exactly — that blur is the point.
Because the pattern is dyed into the thread rather than printed on the surface, it goes all the way through. A Kurume cloth wears out before its pattern does.
She was twelve. The town has been weaving it for two hundred years.
Forty kilometres up the river from this house, on the Chikugo plain. Cotton grew here, indigo was grown and fermented here, and the two together made a cloth the whole of Kyushu wore.
Pieces are found one at a time, in Japan, and photographed before they are listed. Tell us what you are looking for, and we will write when something arrives that answers it.
We write when there is something to write about — some months twice, some months not at all.
Noted. We will write when something arrives.