This Japan trip I had a little time in Tokyo and had the opportunity to visit some wonderful people and do a Temari ball making workshop at Temaricious. A major thank you to Nomo-san who helped make this happen. I learnt about the little shop from String Harvest as she stocks the Temaricious threads. One of the owners, Naho, is quite the inspirational crafter and artist. She explained that the balls have not purpose other than to delight.

Temaricious specialises in balls with naturally dyed cotton. This makes the colours and patterns very appealing to our aesthetics today. The natural dye process on cotton is a more dedicated operation and they had dye suppliers from all sorts of people, including farmers turning over specific plants that they didn’t want.

The Temari balls are potential masterpieces of geometry as seen in these examples created over a long lifetime of work. Such beautiful patterns and ideas.

I had made Temari balls before but some of the instruction was quite different to what I had learnt previously. You can see here my start up with the wonky spherical shape which gradually becomes very even and hard after winding. The inside of the ball was rice husks.

The divisions of the ball were quite easy to achieve without rulers and using a strip of paper which is much more friendly and gives a better sense of where you are going with it all. Using a long needle I just built up the stitching following the guide lines and instruction from Naho. Our three hour session was soon over and I’m yet to fully complete the stitching on the ball. It really was a joyful afternoon and the owners made that possible with their friendly, passionate and dedicated style. Certainly a highlight of my Tokyo visit…different to the 5.1 earthquake!