Japanese Weaving
勿体無い
Mottainai (moat - tie - nigh)
or 'a feeling of regret when something is put to waste without deriving its value'
is the philosophy of never wasting precious material when one can prolong their useful life through recycling and careful reuse.
It is paired with having deep respect for the material, and gratitude that we have such material.
I love this concept and wished to learn about and apply it to my weaving craft.
We often associate Japanese textiles with luxurious refined silk kimonos, however, it was only really the aristocratic elite and the foreign export market where these expensive and time intensive material was used. The middle and upper middle class might wear cotton, or often recycled cotton as cotton was precious. The peasantry used coarse woven hemp cloth.
Orimono 織 物
Orimono simply means fabric, and ori means weaving, and many different systems and styles can be chosen.
Perhaps Shuri-ori 首 里 織 りif one were a fine noble from the warrior caste, or Touzan-Ori 唐 山 織 り using fabrics and yarns imported from India, later being known as Tou Zan. Nishijin-ori 西 陣 織 came from the Nishijin district in Kyoto for the finiest silk obi, from an influx of Chinese immigrants to this area in the 5th to 6th century who introduced how to make silk textiles, or maybe Shusu-Ori 繻 子 織 り for satin weaves. But for Vieille Abeille, and with the Mottainai philosophy firmly in mind, I want to weave some creations over the next year or so using the following two systems.
Zanshi 残 紙
Zanshi means leftover. Zanshi weaving is collecting up of all the leftover threads from a fixed pattern weaving project, blending them into useable threads, and making unique one time designs entirely dependent on the colours and fibres that were leftover. Zanshi cloth was often looked down upon as mishmashed inferior quality. For this project I will use recycled French cottons or Japanese bourette silk and take all my draft patterns from the Orimono Soshiki Hen Textile System book published in Japan 1903 (see my recommended books page). Bourette silk, or soie noil, is a short bumby fibre collected from the waste remnants of silk cloth production, it weaves into a cloth with a distinctly rough, knotty, and uneven surface - I like texture!
Sakiori 裂き織り
Sakiori began in the 18th century and involved ripping up discarded and disparate clothes into uniform(ish) sized small strips and weaving them into a new one-off garment. Saki means to tear or rip.
