Go Fish!

As many of you might suspect after reading about Harry, I have an entire other life that revolves around Japanese embroidery. Some of you have asked me to post some samples, so here is an embroidery that I stitched last winter. It is based on a famous drawing by Utagawa, who adored both fish and cats and made many charming sketches that included them.

I created the design below from a mouse pad purchased at the Tokyo National Museum.

(Click on the picture and wait patiently for a full-sized image).


Japanese embroidery is done entirely with silk and metal threads and is extremely demanding. Trust me--it is far more demanding than any sort of knitting, frog hair notwithstanding. It requires years of concentrated study before any work even approaches the professional level and the materials are very expensive, as well.

For these reasons, there are only about 500 people in the Western world who bother with it and surprisingly, not many more in Japan who pursue it either.

The discipline is further complicated by a lot of ugly backstabbing politics and a level of secrecy usually associated with, say NSA codebreakers or the formula for Coca Cola.

I have taken a short break from the Spider King to work on a sample for a class I will be teaching this summer. The original artwork is part of a very long and charming scroll called Frolicking Animals. The piece is attributed to the Priest Kakuyu (1053-1140), known by his honorary title, Toba Sojo.

I created this little design from a sheet of wrapping paper I bought somewhere. It was sketched in Photoshop and refined in CorelDraw, then printed directly to the fabric with an inkjet printer.

At some point, I will post the finished piece.



Jane, I do hope these little pictures take your mind off tinking the WRS and make you smile!