“Garden of Chrysanthemum”
Traditional Textile Collection
Inspiration
A piece from the UC Davis Design Collection:
The textile is a 69-inches square cotton futon cover from the 20th century Japan. Traditionally, futon covers were often patterned with kasuri, and Japanese mothers would create a kasuri futon as part of a daughter’s trousseau. Globally, Kasuri is known as the Japanese version of ikat. In kasuri, the craftsman ties and dyes a specific length of yarn before weaving. The ties act as resist to create patterns. This textile was a product of double ikat and kon gasuri, the indigo kasuri. Indigo dye is a natural blue dye extracted from various plants and mollusks.
Images from Google Search
In contrast to the peaceful style of the futon cover, Fusi wants to show more liveliness in the collection “Garden of Chrysanthemum” while trying to explore and play with different traditional textile surface design techniques. This collection consists of bright-color fiber reactive dyes, indigo dye, embroidery, and motifs of the chrysanthemum, bamboo branches, and geometric squares. For some designs, Fusi used the indigo dye bath and shibori to create the base and paint colorful patterns on top of the dyed fabric. From browsing online and through books, she realized that a piece of indigo fabric with colorful patterns is rare to find.
Below are test samples that were excluded from the final collection.
