An Exciting Workshop

Yesterday I attended a Society of Bookbinders workshop on Japanese papers and got very excited. The tutor was Clare Prince who talked to us all morning about Japanese handmade papers and how they are made. In the afternoon, we all repaired books using Japanese paper. I will get round to that later but in the meantime the exciting bit. Which was that the Japanese use what I think of as textile techniques to decorate paper! For instance

Indigo dyeing. The tutor had several fine examples of graduated dyeing with indigo and, surprise, surprise, some examples of shibori!! The above is very delicate. Most of the examples I saw were robust, dark dark blue/black shading to the palest of blues.

And even more surprising, examples of katazome. Katazome is where you stencilled onto the fabric (or paper) with resist resist, then dip the object in indigo or dye, then wash off the resist. These papers are very high quality and have been over dyed in several colours.

 And these examples are bingata which is a stencilling technique from Okinawa. So what are the dyes used, apart from indigo? They are natural dyes with the handmade paper and use things like alder cones and paulownia.

I have acquired instructions on how to dye paper with indigo and intend to try this out. Any handmade paper I have in store is certainly too heavy so I will have to buy some Japanese paper.