Sarasa — the printed and dyed cotton chintz that began in India and traveled the world — took on a life of its own once it reached Japan. This book gives you 820 of those Japanese sarasa patterns, gathered from original pattern books (shoe-cho) of the Meiji and Taisho eras and reissued here in a new edition.
The bulk of the volume is the patterns themselves, organized so you can move between families of design: imported-style florals copied by Japanese dyers, native Japanese floral motifs, yuzen-influenced sarasa, small-repeat komon and chugata patterns, and a section of birds, animals, and insects including butterflies. Alongside these you get earlier material as well — a late Edo pattern-paper section and merchant record books — which lets you trace how the vocabulary of Japanese sarasa shifted across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Kamon Yoshimoto opens the book with an essay on the shoe-cho pattern drawings and their place in Japanese textile history. For textile designers, surface pattern artists, quilters, kimono collectors, and anyone building a reference library of historical ornament, 160 pages of period source material like this is hard to come by outside Japan.
The text is in Japanese, but the pattern plates are visual throughout and can be used directly as reference. Published by Graphic-sha Publishing. Brand new copy.
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