Motohiko Katano was a Japanese artist that switched careers to textiles at the age of 57 and created his own unique form of Shibori based on accurate pleating of fabric which was then stitched in repeating motifs down its whole length.

Accuracy is needed to get an accurate fold, with many rows of evenly spaced running stitch applied down the length of the fabric and then pulled up and knotted off to produce the starting point for the pattern stitching.

I decided to stitch two different cross patterns, swapping between each one down the length of the fabric. This requires many hours of sewing and is hard work as you have to sew through multiple layers of cloth.

Some stitchers apply strips of folded fabric to the two outside edges as these parts retain the hand stitched marks made by the maker but I like these as it shows the process and, in my opinion, makes the piece more interesting as a result.

The piece was dipped 10 times in Japanese indigo at Bryan Whitehead’s silk farmhouse in Fujino, Japan in the Spring of 2025 and then bashed in the river to wash off the loose indigo and get a sharp contrast between the rich indigo blue and the white of the fabric.