Kimono Patterns

On the way to looking for something else, I ran into a post with this wonderful photograph. It’s a book from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the blog writer says about her visit to the museum:

“One of the most wonderful things, in my opinion, was a huge (C19?) pattern book, full of all the different stencil patterns that could be printed onto fabric to make into a kimono….We also saw some original stencils such as would have been used to make these samples. They were made out of several layers of mulberry paper, and glued together with persimmon tannin. It must have been such an effort just to make the stencils, let alone print the fabric as well.”

Click here to see a much larger version of the photo. Of course then I spent a very happy hour searching for kimono pattern books, oblivious to the task I had tried to accomplish in the first place!