Japanese Cotton Noren Curtain – Milky Way Indigo Door Curtain

Dyed by Hozuai in Kameoka, Kyoto - the workshop that brought Kyoto's own indigo back after it had been gone for a century.
A 100% cotton doorway curtain called Ama-no-gawa, the Milky Way - a night sky drawn across a mountain ridge. It is dyed with Ryukyu indigo in mura-shibori, the uneven resist, where the cloth is bound so that the dye pools in some places and thins in others of its own accord. The unevenness is never repeated: no two curtains carry the same night sky.
- Material: 100% cotton
- Indigo / method: Ryukyu indigo / mura-shibori, uneven resist
- Size: 90 cm wide x 120 cm long
- Motif: Ama-no-gawa, the Milky Way over a night mountain
- Hand-dyed one piece at a time
The workshop - Kyoto once had its own water-blue indigo, praised as kyo-asagi. In 1923 it vanished: imported and chemical indigo pushed it out, and what was left of it became known as maboroshi no kyo-ai, the phantom Kyoto indigo.
Hozuai went looking for it in Tokushima, the old country of Awa indigo, and met a nineteenth-generation indigo master there. His seed, it turned out, had been carried from Kyoto generations earlier. The seed came home - to Hozu, in Kameoka, on the river of the same name.
The fields are worked with local farmers on land that had been left fallow. A row house flooded in the 2013 typhoon was rebuilt as the dyeing studio, where more than 1,500 people a year now put their hands into the vat for the first time.
Shipped directly from Kyoto, Japan. Packed with care for international delivery.