Once famous for the brightly coloured traditional Japanese textile called Bingo Gasuri, the Kittaka family are now one of the last surviving kasuri weavers in Hiroshima. They use slightly more modern looms and the variation in their blues and the softness of the slightly grey undyed yarn, combined with the blurriness of the kasuri technique make for lovely gentle fabrics.

On some of their textiles, you can notice a slightly rusty tone, which is the result of using a persimmon dyed yarn in the weft. This is getting rarer and rarer. Persimmon was a very useful fruit in paper and textile production but when it is processed it really smells and fewer and fewer families want to do the unglamorous work of making persimmon dye which you can see beautifully with our persimmon mixed pattern cushion.