photos from a trip for international students to a pottery town.

kyoto is a center of traditional crafts in this area (kansai, western japan). it's great that people in general love these crafts, and also interesting that craft traditions continue for hundreds of years, but remain relevate to contempoary life--often in the form of traditional fabric/patterns used for bags, ect. this store is interesting--they make all sorts of figures from silk cocoons.

here's a random design that i saw the other day: its a photo album (a fully analogue traditional one, with paper and a plastic pockets), but it's called a blog album. hee hee. usually, quirky english doen't phase me much anymore, but this one works on a different level.

the internet (itunes makes it even easier), allows me to listen to kexp and watch democracy now...awesome.
the best independant radio station in the world:
and the best news source:
if you don't know, check them out. if you do, give them money!


"i don't know many people who are still interested in art for art's sake...we have flowers for that"
-alice walker , democracy now 11.17.06

well, i finally have the internet again!
my day job, here in kobe japan, is researching post-disaster community-building.
but never fear, i'm still crafty.
i think in the kansai area, most of the craft stores/ traditional craft culture is located in kyoto (about 1.5 hours by train from me). tomorrow i'll go back to a great little shop there that sells all sorts of wool supplies: http://www.hitsuji.co.jp/ (yup, it's all in japanese-welcome to my world)
also, i'm going to track down a store that specializes in dyes...
these leads are coming from the itami craft museum: http://www.mac-itami.com/english/index.html
which i visited last month, and offers TONS of crafting classes...i plan to join a few starting in january.