This is a one-off little piece of Boro that combines some of my fabrvourite things about Japanese textiles.

It is a double-sided piece of Katazome stencil fabric that has used at least 3 stencils in the making, one for each colour, indigo blue, red and grey. The red is most likely from madder and the grey will be sumi ink suspended in soy milk.

The bolt (“tan” around 12 yards long) from which this piece came would havehas a rice paste resist applied through a finely cut paper stencil (and pattern matched) down its whole length and then flipped and pattern matched on the other side!

This would be a lot of work with just one colour, but this process has been repeated 3 times, once for each colour. It is a legendary effort!

There’s an original Boro mend on the back (see pic) and a couple of holes but this is a lovely piece to add to any collection of Japanese textiles.

The piece most likely came from a cotton Yukata (summer weight) kimono which must have been pretty fancy in its day…