Paste-resist dyeing: placing a barrier before colour

Paste-covered areas receive protection while exposed areas can take colour. Washing away the resist reveals the relationship between motif and ground. Resist paste is not automatically coloured dye. Some stencil methods apply coloured paste or brush colour directly, so a stencil alone does not identify every process as the same kind of resist.

A cut stencil fixes openings through which a spatula can place paste, supporting repeated motifs. Tsutsugaki uses a filled tube to draw lines and forms directly. Fine resist outlines in yuzen and covering paste over already-coloured motifs perform further tasks of separation and protection.

In the stencil-dyeing example described by Kashiwa City, the maker cuts and reinforces a stencil, applies paste through it, lets the paste dry, brushes on colour and washes away the resist. Covering paste can then protect coloured motifs while the ground is dyed. The maker then washes away that covering paste and dries the cloth. Other dyeing methods use different colouring and fixing stages.

Ise stencils and commerce

Stencil production had its own commercial history. The origins of Ise katagami remain disputed, but backing from Kishu domain helped makers and merchants around Shiroko and Jike extend their sales networks in the Edo period. Surviving stencils bear era names from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, providing material evidence beyond origin legends.

Nineteenth-century household textiles

Late-Edo and Meiji tsutsugaki decorated bridal bedding, wrapping cloths and other household textiles. The Japan Folk Crafts Museum also holds a later nineteenth-century cotton sleeping cover with stencil-dyed cartwheel motifs. These objects show how different ways of applying resist served large textiles used in daily life. In this sleeping cover, pale outlines separate overlapping wheels from dark and reddish forms on a yellow-brown ground. The repeated wheels fill the large garment-shaped surface.

Serizawa’s work in cloth and paper

In the twentieth century, Keisuke Serizawa used stencil dyeing in book design, including a dyed-cloth cover for the first Kogei issue in 1931. Wartime cloth shortages prompted work on dyed paper; calendars became one of its postwar uses. Material supply and new markets thus redirected an established process.