Day 18. A day around Karume a town famous for blue and white kasuri dyeing. We were greeted by Shoji Yamamura the distinguished master craftsman. He showed us his beautiful kimonos and workshop.

He showed us how the pattern is made for tie dyeing the weft on this special board.

This is a pattern he would use to mark the design on one long weft thread. Then that pattern thread would be used to tie all the wefts.

This is another pattern and the woven cloth on the loom.

Here we are very happy after a wonderful morning.

We visited a factory using old looms to weave weft ikat or kasuri. Mr. Shigehori Maruyama showed us around. The name of the company is Marugame. Seeing kasuri machine woven and machine tied—and machine untied was interesting.

The tie dyed weft threads are wound on special stick shuttles that can be woven by a fly shuttle. This was amazing to see. I’m not sure just how the stick shuttles unwound so fast with the fly shuttle.

This is a close look at part of the machine that does the tying for the tie dyed weft threads. 12 bundles of weft threads are being tied at once. The spools spin around the threads. Then stop and the machine advances the threads then the next sections are tied. It is very fast.