"Broken Bamboo" Katagami StencilVintage Japanese katagami stencilIt took an email from a textile art curator to tell us what this stencil depicted. Can you see the two nodes of bamboo with broken, jagged edges, and with leaves and little rounded buds at the node joints? It turns out that this design was popular in the early 20th Century, but we hadn't come across it at all in the last 20 years, which makes it doubly fascinating to us.Katagami are the stencils used to create layers of design on traditional Japanese kimono. Each one is cut by hand, either with a free-hand knife or a sharp and tiny punch tool. They are made from one or two sheets of heavy paper and then covered with persimmon juice to add strength and moisture resistance. (For delicate designs, two sheets of paper were stacked and cut together, then a thin silk screen was placed between them before fusing the papers together with persimmon juice.) Nowadays, more durable plastic versions are used, but these older paper stencils are often still usable in addition to being a work of art.See video below for how stencils are made.
