The helpful manager in TRY6 gave me a tip about another gallery he thought might have some sashiko, and sure enough when I reached the galerie arbre, I discovered the work of two more sashikoists. 
​Kogin mameco, the needle name of a lady who specializes in kogin sashiko, had a lovely range of book covers, zip pouches and pencil cases on display. Once again, however, I couldn’t resist the brooches, and purchased a sweet button-sized brooch covered in a rough-weave beige cloth stitched with a red ume no hana (plum flower). See Kogin mameco’s work here.

Hitomezashi and kogin sashiko are currently extremely popular in Japan, so I was not surprised that all the sashiko I had found so far was exclusively in those two styles. The sashikoist known as harinoto, who lives in Tochigi prefecture (which is not Tohoku) and whose work I also discovered in galerie arbre, however, was doing something quite original with kogin. Harinoto had made a series of coasters representing the six prefectures in Tohoku, stitched with a kogin-style motif emblematic of each prefecture. These were apples for Aomori, iron tea-pots for Iwate, woven straw horses for Akita, wooden kokeshi dolls for Miyagi, cherries for Yamagata, and toy red cows for Fukushima. Naturally I bought a kokeshi doll coaster as a souvenir of my visit to Miyagi.  

​​New years greetings and best wishes for happy stitching in 2018!
 
I love the beginning of a new year, when anything still seems possible. This year I am especially excited to be starting the year with my Watts Sashiko website. I’d dreamed of making this happen for a long time and was thrilled last year to finally get started. There are still many refinements to make and projects to get started, but little by little I’m moving forward. Please sign up for the newsletter if you’d like to get monthly updates of my progress.
 
I’m thrilled to be starting on the next phase of my vision – the subscription kits. Kits were very important to me when I first started sashiko, as I had no one to consult or teach me (in pre-internet days), but finding and choosing them was always a random process, and I was often confused by the instructions. That experience led me to the idea of offering subscription sets. If I can deliver a short series of kits in a particular style, with instructions translated by me, and subscribers can share that experience with each other, then overall it should add up to a fun and informative experience of learning about sashiko.

So for my first offering I have three special order Hitomezashi (‘one stitch’) kits from Olympus, which you won’t find available anywhere else on the internet. Hitomezashi is typical of Shonai sashiko one of the three major sashiko styles. ​The deadline for ordering this series is January 15th.