Japanese Linen Noren Curtain – Hateruma Waves 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% linen doorway curtain dyed with Ryukyu indigo by itajime - board clamping, where the folded cloth is pressed between boards so the dye reaches only what is left open to it. The bands run the length of the cloth and the shade deepens from one end to the other, so the curtain reads as depth rather than flat colour. Linen lets the light through; it hangs as well in a modern doorway as in a traditional one. Each piece is clamped and dipped by hand, so no two are identical.
- Material: 100% linen
- Indigo / method: Ryukyu indigo / itajime, board-clamp resist
- Size: 90 cm wide x 120 cm long
- 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.