July is Gion Matsuri festival time in Kyoto. As the city gears up for the biggest parade of the year on Tuesday, the streets downtown are all closed off to cars, and are lined with street food stalls and people peddling all sorts of festival goodies.
This month’s theme was Summer. Very appropriate – it was baking as I made my way from the little train station to my Sensei’s house.
I have never noticed the colour and texture of blueberries in a way I did when photographing them for this session.
And all the little tricks – the water spray, the fanning out of stray berries, the reflection of light with a white foam board – are all so good to know. I am learning a lot!
The good news just keeps pouring in for our fantastic graduates of The Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design (the e-course) The lovely Suzanne Washington has been signed by Wallpapered.com and has created a collection of 6 beautiful designs for them! You can see her fantastic designs below. This was a direct result of Suzanne submitting to a live brief set by Wallpapered.com for Module 3.
You can see more of her fabulous work on her website: Suzyspellbound
Congratulations to Suzanne & well done to all of our e-course graduates! So proud!
A couple of days after we arrived in Kyoto, my man and I went on a long cycle across the city (hence the dodgy outfit in the photo below!) and out west, through rice paddies and bamboo forests under a huge blue sky. I wanted to show him where I lived for a formative year when I studied here at the tender age of 19, doing homestay with a Japanese family.
I had written them a postcard and intended to pop it through their door, hoping to arrange to meet up some time soon. But when we turned into their road, my homestay mother was out in the street chatting to a neighbour. “Besu???” she cried. (There is no ‘th’ sound in the Japanese language so my name becomes Besu!) I was surprised she recognised me after more than 15 years, but she did right away. Within five minutes she had called over my homestay father (the sweetest old man ever), invited us in for sweet potatoes and tea, phoned her daughter, got the old photo albums out and got the neighbours round!
With my homestay parents, Mr & Mrs Ito, outside the house I lived in for a year aged 19
As we sat in their living room sipping tea I had a kaleidoscope of flashbacks – feeding fish sticks to their dog from the little kitchen table, making long distance calls to my family from the phone by the window (no Skype back then!), checking the bottom step of the staircase for letters that had arrived in thin blue airmail envelopes, being dressed in a kimono for my coming-of-age ceremony back when I was 20… one after another the memories came rushing back, and it was lovely to be able to share them with my man.
When we had finished up our tea and my man had polished off the last of the sweet potatoes, we and half the neighbourhood headed over to Heiankyo for a festival by Ikeshita pond, with more tea served by ladies in kimonos. What a lovely unexpected interlude that was – and such a blessing to know there are people in this city with whom we go way back.
The other day we got up really early to go to a famous temple so I could take pictures before all the tourists arrived. But when we got there we realised it didn’t actually open until 9am. So instead of hanging around, we got back on our bikes and went for an impromptu two hour cycle ride. Knackered by nine but oh-so-awake and inspired! Here are some pictures from the road to Takao…
I am completely in love with this house entrance…
One of my favourite little paths in Kyoto is the Tetsugaku-no-michi (‘The Philosopher’s Path).
When the cherry blossom is out it is one of the busiest places in Kyoto, but I like to think that is because everyone is a philosopher, and they all have so much to philosophise about!
We snuck back the other evening, when the night was dark but the air was warm and the place was unusually empty. We parked our bikes at the top of the stream and walked along the tree-lined bank to a little bridge where fireflies were dancing in the blackness. Magical green glowing fairies, hovering over branches, dipping and diving, serenading each other. I wonder what they were thinking about…
‘Hollywood dream’ rollercoaster – Hollywood nightmare more like!
On Friday my man skyved of school (shhh) and we sneaked away to Universal Studios Japan – a surreal expanse of movie sets and theme park rides near Osaka. I am totally terrified of roller coasters but made myself go on most of the rides and surprised myself by actually loving some of them!
Waterworld
It was refreshing to be in a little piece of America for a day, although it has definitely been Japan-ified (Hello Kitty everywhere)…
Some of the rides are based on really old films, and it was quite freaky to listen to the Terminator ride with it’s wild guesses as to what incredible far-flung future technology would look like – it predicted online education (e-courses) and video phone calls (Skype)! Thank goodness the robots haven’t quite made it yet…
That car from Back to the Future
Such a good day of being alternately scared and elated, laughing a lot and having fun.
The amazingly realistic ‘Amity Village’ from the Jaws ride
Sunny days are made for picnics, and no-one makes a packed lunch quite like the Japanese! (Check this video out to see what I mean!) I have never seen such a variety of lunchboxes – fabulous products for surface pattern design (you can tell polka dots are big in Japan this year!) Here are some I found in Loft Kyoto.
The Kyoto Botanical Gardens is a perfect place to chill out in the sun, as well as shake up the routine. We have been experimenting with lots of picnic goodies from the supermarket. No cucumber sandwiches here – delicious fried noodles and weird vegetables instead…
When was the last time you took a picnic outside? What’s your favourite picnic food?
Me holding a silkworm cocoon (image: Emma Omote)
During my time at Kawashima Textile School I was lucky enough to join a demonstration with silk artist Mayumi Terakawa. Not only did she share an insight into her process, and let us touch her delicate works, but she also showed us how to get silk from the cocoons of silkworms.
Finding the first thread from each cocoon with silk artist Mayumi Terakawa (image: Emma Omote)
It was completely fascinating. I am rather embarrassed to say that it had never really crossed my mind what happens to the silkworms themselves. I soon found out… and was rather freaked out to find the silkworms reveal themselves when the cocoon had been spun out into a reel of silk.
Reeling the silk (image: Emma Omote)
A staggering 4000 cocoons are needed to make one kimono – and in order to spin those cocoons, the silkworms inside need 400kg of mulberry leaves to munch away on! Silk is a dying industry in Japan, and now only 1% of kimono silk is homegrown, simply because demand massively outweighs supply. The remaining silk producers in this country have an average age of 75 and young people don’t seem interested in the labour intensive work involved. Who knows what will become of this tradition in the coming years?
Several threads are reeled at once from the cocoons in the basin. One silk thread is three denier. (image: Emma Omote)
Doing this really made me appreciate the value of silk (good work all you silk worms!), and made me realise why people really treasure silk kimonos. It also made me appreciate just how much work goes into Mayumi Terakawa’s stunning art works – she retrieves the silk herself, spins it and then weaves it to her design.
Raw silk hand-dyed by Mayumi Terakawa (above) and samples of her gorgeous textile works (below)
Other Kawashima textile school posts here: Preparing and dyeing the thread / Preparing giant bobbins / Preparing the warp / Preparing the loom / Time for weaving! / Lessons in weaving, lessons in life / Colour magic / Silkworm encounter
