Please come up to the stage, Ms. Fukumi Shimura
I was newly divorced with two children
And I didn’t know how to make a living
I happened to talk to folk craft founder Yanagi Sōetsu
He told me, your mother could weave, you should weave as well
And that’s how it started
And I then fell in love with it
I’ve entered an amazing world that I will not exhaust in my lifetime
Our traditional craft has been passed between generations since the Heian Period
In the past nine hundred years we’ve been dyeing in the same manner
In spring, we dye with plants like plum and sakura
Take twigs, boil them and dye fabric in the colored water
After dyeing, store the yarn for weaving
Weaving technically is not difficult, it just takes time
Even the simplest kind of fabric needs months
There are one thousand and two hundred warp threads
And about forty thousand times of weft threads
My mother considers this as her representative work
She attends important events like award ceremonies in it
The kimono has blue in it
Mixed up with green and dark navy
And there are white connecting threads in the green part
I started doing this with Japanese indigo dye
We have indigo dye vat at home
We’d begin preparing the dye at crescent
And full moon is the best time to dye
Now the indigo dye is very very blue
It’s like raising a child
Dye yarns with plants and weave them into a kimono
It’s very different from the clothes in stores
The experience is of great significance to people today
I am overwhelmed by the beauty of plant color
They are not something we can synthesize if we work hard enough
We should respect and cherish the plants when extracting color
Every shade of color is the treasure of my life