Chusen
Chusen is a way of coloring cloth and it was born at the end of Meiji Period. The most popular place to make products in the way is Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture. It’s a method commonly used to make hand towels and yukata ( a kind of kimono ) these days.
We put a paper of about 1 meter for a design on a cloth for a basis and anti-coloring paste on a part of the cloth not for being colored. After we’ve finished doing the work, we fold the cloth up to match to the next edge of 1 meter and put the paper for the design on the cloth and the paste on a part not for coloring again. We do it a few times and turn 24 pieces of the cloth into 48 pieces of it piled up. And then, we make borders to separate them by their colors on top from the paste. When we pour coloring material into the borders and withdraw it from under the cloth by pumps, the same patterns are made in every one of the cloth pieces. When they’ve been colored, we wash the paste and unnecessary coloring material away and it’s completed. We color cloth this way, so Chusen is colored on the front and back in the same way and looks as if edges of it were combined in a part to be folded up. Hand towels of the style don’t look that way much because they’ve been made by being cut where they were folded up, but yukatas of the style look that way if you look at them closely. There are some people who get worried if they’re not good products, but this is a characteristic of Chusen, so please don’t worry.