(2011.5.28) Maiwai Dyeing Workshop @ International House of Japan
Watching an artist at his craft~.
Maiwai dyeing (萬祝染め) is a traditional art/dyeing technique native to Chiba Prefecture. Fisherman used to hand them out to celebrate particularly great catches. You can read more about Maiwai at this page - it's interview with the artist that I went with!
Anyway, pictured here are the happi coat/kimono examples of maiwai. These babies START at 100,000 a piece!!!
Siki and I accompanied Kamogawa's Tourism Department, along with the maiwai artist Suzuki-san (and his super cute daughter!) to Tokyo to help as interpreters for the workshop. We wound up screwing around, but we DID get to learn about maiwai.
I guess we did help out a little though with set-up and clean up. This is the set of stuff for each pair of people doing the dyeing!
Introductions and speeches~. Everyone there (aside from staff) were embassy employees from Mongolia, Korea, Italy, and Canada! It was really neat/weird cause people would walk up to me and Siki and be like "what country('s embassy) are you from?" and expect us to be embassy people too.
Close up of the artist demonstrating how to do gradation.
Since some extra spaces opened up, Siki and I got to participate, hence why we wound up playing around instead of actually working XD. This is the design I chose - a shimenawa! It's a symbol of good luck.
Siki!!! Siki is really awesome and everyone was amazed at his work - he chose the crane.
My failure ;_; The artist tried to comfort me? by saying "自由だね〜"...but it wasn't very comforting at all XD;
The final result! After a couple of days to let it dry, you wash out the brown stuff - a mixture of soy beans? used to make the outline!!! At least it looks a little cleaner? XD;