Kansai trip continued: our last day, but definitely not the least!
In which we learn new crafts and have one more walk around Kyoto, and accidentally snack our way through dinner at Nishiki market
All too soon our last day in Kansai came around, and we’d saved some of the best for last: we’d booked on not one, but two creative workshops to explore the rich craft heritage of Kyoto.
First up, and quite coincidentally around the corner from our hotel, we’d booked a yuzen stencilling workshop at Marumasu Nishimuraya. This shop/workshop/working mini-factory is housed in a beautiful old machiya, which in itself was such a treat to see.
There’s several different workshop you can book, and we choose the yuzen stencilling class, where you pick a fabric object (e.g. bag, tote bag, coasters, fans etc) and then pick a stencil from their extensive collection, get instruction on how to do it and off you go. You can book here and spoiler alert: it’s awesome! We all loved doing this!
I’ve posted a few photos below of some of the items we made. First up, husband choose quite an ambitious and rather marvellous design for a tote bag:
Which turned out wonderful:
I choose a small crossbody bag, and this lovely (if wildly unseasonal) autumn leaf pattern:
A little while later, it’s starting to look like something!
And our oldest made a pair of lovely coasters, here’s the panda one in the making (and you can just see the elbow of some of the other people taking workshops, that group was making chopsticks AND bags to put them in):
And then the end result:
Finally, on our way out, we could see the real artisans at work in the studio, which was a treat.
I cannot rave about this experience enough, we all really loved it plus we got to take our newly made treasures home.
A quick bus ride and lunch later, we found ourselves in the north of Kyoto, for a weaving experience booked through Kyoto Artisans Concierge, an English language website run/affiliated by the local council, which lets you find and book craft workshop experiences.
We didn’t quite know what to expect, and found ourselves in a weaving wonderland at Koho Tatsumura (google maps link), a wonderful and venerable nishiki weaving house. We got a tour, and then tried our hands ourselves at silk weaving. The experience of meeting the master artisan, having him teach us, the wonderful looms was lovely (if a bit overwhelming in the best possible way).
And this is (one of) our end results:
This was such a treat, and added a whole new layer of my understanding of Kyoto and Japanese crafts.
Later on that evening, after dinner, I popped into Kyoto Iwai, a beautiful store with traditional handicrafts (think souvenir, but upmarket, not tourist tat) near Nishiki Market, and they sold amongst other things sample nishiki weavings, meant as samples for future obi and kimono, which of course I couldn’t resist buying one of.
We loved our trip to Kansai, combining the new-to-us (Osaka), the wild (Universal Studios), the yummy (separate foodie-substack post incoming by our resident senior food writer) and the crafty.
