Antique red and white woven sayagata wool fabric

Description

Antique sayagata wool fabric for a kimono, in white on a red ground.

This gorgeous fabric is from an unused roll intended for a kimono, and has a lovely, fully reversible sayagata pattern in white on a red ground.

This is not the scratchy wool of your childhood! Kimono wool is soft, smooth and supple, and has a lovely drape. This would make a gorgeous shirt or dress, and the soft edges to the pattern come from the threads being dyed before weaving.. it blurs the edges and gives it a gentle slight irregularity to the design, adding real character. The technique is similar to Ikat weaving.

The fabric is sold by the meter, and is 37 cm wide. If you wish to have more than one meter, simply order as many units as you wish and it will come in one piece.

• Sayagata:  the swastika is often found as part of a repeating pattern. One common pattern, called sayagata in Japanese, is made of of interlocking manji/swastikas, left- and right-facing swastikas joined by lines. As the negative space between the lines has a distinctive shape, the sayagata pattern is sometimes called the “key fret” motif in English.

• Ikat: Ikat fabric is made (dying the threads before they are woven so the pattern emerges on the loom. It is a fascinating process and one that, once you recognize it on cloth, will be sure to make you wonder about the time and skill involved in creating it. The technique is sometimes called “fuzzy weave” since the patterning is often blurred because even the most accurate dying and weaving may not align the differently dyed threads exactly. When only the warp threads are ikat-dyed, this is a single ikat and you will see the “fuzziness” running in only one direction. When both the warp and weft threads are dyed before weaving, this is a double ikat and the fuzziness runs in both directions