Katazome-shi Journals Made with Stencil-dyed paper

After my visit to Suzuki Shofudo, the 120 year old Japanese paper store in Kyoto, you can imagine my excitement to get home and make some beautiful new journals with my new paper! But how could I showcase the wonderful colors and patterns? I decided to try a new type of cover design that would show off two of the stencil-dyed Katazome papers at once – a diagonal journal! One of the neat things about this design is that I can create two journals at once, but one of them is the inverse of the other. Twin Journals!

You can also see my Katazome Journals for Sale in my etsy shop, tooÂ – international shipping available, and you can check out as “guest”. These journals contain 160 blank pages of 100% recycled paper, perfect for writing or sketching because they lay flat when open. One of my customers noted that they are also “Fountain pen friendly”!

Here I am filled with delight to be surrounded by this super-rare Japanese handmade Katazome paper in my trip to Kyoto in September 2016 – here in the US I have to mail-order it specially! You can find some on Amazon: Katazome-shi paperÂ but the patterns are somewhat limited.

Some people think that mixing patterns should never be done, but I think if you do it the right way the result is very exciting! My advice is to look for two papers that contain the same colors – for example in the set of books above, the vertical blue bars are the exact same ink color as the blue diamonds in the checkerboard patterned paper. Also, the small white motif in the checkerboard paper mimicked the small white motifs in the paper with the color bars. If you really want to get serious about sharpening your pattern recognition skills, I highly recommend playing SET: The family card game of visual perceptionÂ – You’ll find that you can actually improve your ability to observe and match patterns if you train your eye.