For one evening only, four makers from Okayama, Japan sit down with us to teach the first step of Akō Dantsu — Japan’s cotton rug tradition.
In 1849 a woman named Naka Kojima came across a Chinese carpet and set out to work out how it was made. She had no teacher, and it took her until 1874. What she arrived at was not the carpet she started from. She replaced the wool with cotton, which suited Japan’s humid summers. She made the pieces for tatami rooms rather than for floors, and they went to the teahouses and high-end restaurants of Kyoto. And she added a finishing step that exists nowhere in the tradition she borrowed from: carving the surface of the pile with a single pair of Japanese hand shears, so the pattern stands up in relief. That craft is Akō Dantsu, named for the coastal town in Hyōgo where it settled, and counted as one of Japan’s three great dantsu traditions.
You will not make a rug — a rug takes months. You will make what a rug is made of. Working on a small frame loom that comes to you already warped, you tie tufts of plant-dyed cotton onto the threads one knot at a time, trim the pile level, comb it open until it turns to velvet, and finish the piece as a keyring or a brooch. It is about 5 × 5 cm, it is dense, and no two come out alike — the colour goes in one knot at a time and you decide where it goes.
The cotton did not start out as craft yarn. It is surplus from a canvas mill in Okayama, the region that makes most of Japan’s sailcloth, taken off the factory floor and dyed by hand with plants. It is spun fine and bundled several strands together, which is why the finished pile comes out soft rather than wiry.
The session is led by Noriko Yamanaka of Arts & Crafts Village in Okayama, a member of the Ako Gabbeh collective — the group of weavers carrying the Akō Dantsu technique into contemporary work — with three colleagues assisting. With four makers in the room, almost nobody works alone.
No experience is necessary
Taught in Japanese with English interpretation
Take home the piece you make, the same night
The makers are in New York as guests of Loop of the Loom, whose exhibition of hand-knotted work, Japanese Craftswomen: Knotting Life and Art. This is the only evening they are teaching in Manhattan.
