A Glorious Length of Old Shifu: Recycled Paper Yarn Weft

47" x 13 3/4", 119.5 cm x 35 cm

This is an unusually generously sized length of visually rich and nuanced, rustic shifu which is cloth woven from twisted, hand made paper yarn.

Offered here is a desirable type of shifu, that is, one that shows traces of ink in the form of randomly spaced areas of dark blips.

These clusters of dark blips are the ink that was written on the paper (washi), most likely pages from an accounting book of a type that provided the base for this wonderful shimacho, also offered on this website.

The warp yarns are three shades of  cotton which lend a vertically-oriented striped effect to this woven length.

As said above, if you look at the surface of this length of shifu you will see small black blips that populate the weft portion of the cloth; these small markings are ink-based hand writing, and it is this detail that is desirable when considering a rustic shifu fragment.

This piece of cloth is in good, used condition with one bean-sized stain, shown in the lead image here. What is not shown on these photos here are the loose paper yarns which have come undone at the top and bottom of the length--seeing the way these yarns are exposed shows us how they were made and how finely cut and twisted they are. On them, too, you can easily see the ink from the writing on the page from which the yarn was made.

This is a collectible length of old cloth and one that will be as much a treasure in years to come as it is now.

A rare treat.

Very recommended.