JAPAN SASHIKO — LEARNING A TRADITIONAL STITCH

I'd never heard of sashiko before I went to Japan. I came across it while I was there, a woman in a shop showed me how it worked, and I came home with a couple of Daruma kits and enough thread to get started.

That's genuinely how this one began.

WHAT SASHIKO IS

Sashiko is a traditional Japanese hand stitching technique — running stitches worked in a repeating geometric pattern on fabric, originally used to reinforce and repair cloth. The patterns are printed directly onto the fabric in the kit, so you follow the lines rather than transferring a design yourself. No embroidery hoop either — you hold the fabric in your hand and load multiple stitches onto the needle at once before pulling through, which is different from how most embroidery works.

The goal is consistency — even stitches on the front, and ideally a back that looks as clean as the front. Each direction of the pattern gets stitched in one continuous pass before you move to the next, which is what creates that characteristic layered geometric effect.

THE FIRST SAMPLER — FOREST

The first kit I worked was Mori — forest — a pattern of small repeating pine trees. Once the lady in the shop had shown me how to read and  follow the instructions on the sampler I found my rhythm fairly quickly, its a simple running stitch. The stitching itself is meditative in the same way the kimono hand stitching was — repetitive, quiet, completely absorbing.

Keeping the back as neat as the front is harder than it sounds. I didn't manage it on these first two, but on a later piece I got there — it just takes practice and patience with your thread tension.

THE SECOND — CHRISTMAS SNOWFLAKE

The second sampler is a different pattern entirely — a Christmas tree shape built from individual snowflake motifs, with hanging snowflakes around it, all stitched in blue. It's much more intricate than the forest pattern, the individual snowflake designs within the larger tree shape requiring more attention to keep the stitch direction consistent across the different elements.

Same technique, much more complex result. A good way to see how quickly sashiko can scale up in difficulty while still using the same basic running stitch.

WHY IT STUCK

I've kept going with sashiko since coming back. It's portable, it's quiet, it requires nothing more than fabric, a needle, and thread — and the results are genuinely beautiful. It's one of those techniques that sounds simple until you're doing it, and then you realize how much there is to learn.