intangibly treasured

at about 3.30 this morning

Morpheus kicked aside the covers

and went somewhere else

leaving me sleepless

so i dangled a hand over the edge of the bed

 and fished up the nearest piece of reading material

which happened to be

an excellent text sent to me by

Janet de Boer

organiser of the Geelong Textile Forum

where Miyoko Kawahito will be teaching later this year

pootling through the pages i learned something new [several, really]

that in Japan, certain processes may be denoted Intangible Treasures. and then there are also Tangible Treasures.

and 

that there is actually a proper Japanese descriptor for the process of beating leaves into cloth. Miyoko Kawahito calls it tataki-zome, whereas i gave it the label hapa-zome [back in 2006 when i sat in the green room of the Yamaguchi Performing Arts Centre, beating leaves from roadside weeds and cemetery prunings into a 6 metre x 6 metre floorcloth for a scene in "Wanderlust"]

the funny thing is that hapa-zome has become part of the dye vocabulary and i've even seen it referred to [in print] as "the ancient art of hapa-zome". the art may indeed be ancient but the appellation certainly isn't.

anyway, for the record

tataki means "beaten"

whereas hapa means "leaf"

Martha was busy digesting a mouse

and couldn't care less