Traditions: Inspired by Sashiko

I suspect that all of us who have stashes of yarn, fabric, pieces of old lace, or ribbons are motivated on occasion to go into our collections with the aim of giving one or more items a new lease on life. One day, I went to my stash of kimono fabrics and pulled out a piece that deserved the chance to be part of something beautiful.

The fabric was a five-color silk dyed in the kasuri style with a matte finish, slight slub, and, although thin, not much drape. Its compelling feature was its intricate design. Kasuri, like double ikat, is a design technique in which warp and weft threads are independently resist-dyed with repeating sequences that don’t reveal the complete design until they interact with each other in the woven cloth. There wasn’t enough of the 14-inch-wide fabric to make a complete garment, but if I complemented it with a piece of handwoven cloth, I knew something unique was possible.

Previously, I had spent some time translating traditional sashiko embroidery patterns into weaving drafts that use supplemental warp and weft for vertical and horizontal lines, with hand embroidery on the loom for diagonals when needed to complete the pattern. I was eager to see how I might use this technique to produce a companion fabric for the silk.

Left: Bamboo stitch sample. Right: Ju stitch sample.

Analysis of the Kimono

The primarily black kimono fabric had five distinct colored figures: bamboo stems and leaves in gold and green; butterflies in orange and gold; well curbs (a motif similar to a hashtag) in orange, white, and gold; small flowers in green and white; and the character 十, or ju (10), in white. There were strong vertical lines in the bamboo stems, groups of 十, and strong diagonals crossing each other made by the bamboo leaves, well curbs, and butterflies. Additionally, there were two-pick weftwise stripes in the figures. It appeared that the weaving had two rows of black weft that alternated with two picks of pattern-dyed weft.

Left: Well-curb stitch sample. Right: Embroidery in progress.

Planning the Handwoven Companion

I started by choosing the woven sashiko-inspired pattern. I have developed over 50 sashiko-inspired drafts. For each, the final scale of the pattern depends on the sett of the fabric and how long the stitch floats need to be to make a readable design without being too long for practical wear. I decided I wanted a unit of the repeat that was larger than the small 十 in the kimono fabric but smaller than the large butterflies and well-curb elements. I also wanted a sashiko-inspired pattern that was mutable—one that I could weave and embellish with hand-embroidered diagonals that I could vary selectively.

I looked first at the sashiko-inspired drafts that represented the same symbols in the silk fabric. Among my sample drafts, I had well curb, bamboo, and 十 patterns.

I estimated a sett of 18 ends per inch, and upon inspection, it appeared that at this sett, the well curb would be too big. Bamboo and were too small. However, if I used the rice pattern, 米, I could satisfy both my criteria. The figure size would be smaller than the large elements and larger than the small ones. If I removed the diagonals in places, what was left was a large version of the 十.

My next decision was about ground and figure colors. I’ve often found it frustrating to look for contemporary yarns in colors of the traditional Japanese palette. Ideally, the ground would be black with the sashiko figures in a strongly contrasting white or gold. However, the black in the kimono silk had a slight green cast and would have seemed a dark gray next to a large amount of modern true black. I decided on gold, largely because the orange was too vivid and the green was going to be hard to match. Black for supplemental warp and weft would contrast well with a gold ground cloth.

Now it was time to plan the ground cloth. With a tentative color plan, I began to look for both shiny and matte yarns in something similar to the gold in the kimono fabric. I wanted to create an illusion of some texture while producing a smooth fabric that wouldn’t distort the placement of the supplemental yarns. Shiny combined with dull could do just that. I was lucky to find a honey-colored bamboo and a mustard 8/2 cotton that, together, made a nice gold. For my supplemental warp and weft, I chose a black soft cotton, slightly heavier than size 8 pearl cotton.

I also wanted to create a subtle stripe to echo the two-pick stripes in the silk. I decided to simplify the three-shuttle weaving by consistently alternating one pick of the shiny bamboo with one of the matte cotton. Each supplemental warp end was bordered with either two shiny or two matte warp ends. These warp pairs wove as one in the plain-weave areas. The result was a mix of subtle vertical and horizontal striped blocks in the ground cloth.

The weaving went smoothly but not swiftly. I could weave five repeats of the pattern in 5 minutes, and then it would take me 40 minutes to embroider the diagonals. Still, the exactness of the pattern satisfied my desire to create precise sashiko-style designs, and the embroidery became a meditative exercise.

Left: The front of the finished top. Center: Close up of the top’s front. Right: Flower embellishments.

Combining New and Old

Finishing the woven fabric was uneventful: I washed it gently in warm water, put it in the dryer on low for a bit, and then pressed it. I had to piece the silk with a half width to complete the sleeve and match the diagonal line of the design. After that, construction of the top was straightforward, with the exception of lining the handwoven fabric with a lightweight batiste. I lined it to protect long weft floats on the wrong side and cover places where supplemental diagonals were going to be removed.

Taking out some of the embroidery I had so painstakingly stitched was a way of accenting the relationship between the rice stitch and the 十 stitch and highlighting the subtle difference in visual density between those two stiches. I wanted to echo the diagonal lines of the kimono fabric by creating diagonal shifts in the sashiko-style patterns. On the front, which I wanted to be more subdued, I took out some of the rice diagonals in the lower third and even some of the remaining 十 stitches at the very bottom. On the back, the areas where I removed embroidery were more extensive. If I could have anticipated where these areas were going to be on the finished garment, I could have avoided stitching the diagonals there in the first place, but I was not confident I could do so. I picked out selected areas and secured the ends on the back of the fabric.

As a final embellishment, I made three padded flowers using the remnants of the silk and attached them at the neckline beside the front seam.

All in all, I’m grateful to the unknown dyers and weavers who made my bit of kimono fabric and pleased I could contribute to the next phase of its history. I’ve become even more enthusiastic about exploring woven sashiko-style design applications in combination with other fabrics, as well as its potential all on its own.