Katayori

As I have long promised, I'm going to do a post about how to make katayori. Katayori is a tightly twisted thread with 5, 5½, or 6 silk threads undertwisted together and then overtwisted with 1 metal thread or a half strand of silk thread as the core. The result is a ridgy or bumpy looking thread that is then couched down (because it's too thick to stitch), with the ends sunk.

The process is a little tricky and it's hard to give exact directions because you're kind of going by look and feel. Frankly, it almost feels like luck when it turns out right. But I'm going to do my best here.

When I initially started out, my tutor told me to do 10-foot lengths (because the thread shrinks up about a foot). Right off, I knew I had no desire to try to separate out a half strand of 10-foot-long silk thread (it's tedious when it's 18 inches), so I opted to just use 5 full strands of silk. I tried making this huge length of katayori with an obliging door handle and an even more obliging friend (Craig):

This was a pretty dismal failure. It took forever to twist and it never really looked right to me. It also required two people to stretch out lengths of silk that long, which made it kind of a non-starter for me because I do not often have two people. Typically, I have me and I have Beau. And while Beau is adorable, one could not say he is particularly helpful. Just in general, he is not an asset to Japanese embroidery. 😉 This is how he spends most of his time:

So Craig comes over occasionally to help me with two-person jobs and, calling on his vast knowledge of popular music, to sing relevant songs while we work — in this case, all songs about twisting, turning, and spinning (here's his katayori playlist).

But I needed a reliable method of making my own katayori without relying on another person to come at the exact moment I was ready to work on it. I decided that I really had no need for 9-foot lengths of katayori — at least not for the phase 3 project I was making it for. So I decided to try making shorter lengths of 4–5 feet. This was infinitely more successful, and best of all, I could do it on my own (though Craig did come over to take pictures for this post because I don't have enough hands for that).

So the first step was to make five 4-foot lengths of silk around my awl and my Kreinik twister and slip knot them at both ends to hold them securely. Then I started twisting the handle in a clockwise direction:

It has to be a very tight twist, which is one reason I use the Kreinik twister; it just makes it a little easier, and the thread won't slip out from between my hands. After twisting it for a bit, the thread began to get small ridges in it:

Eventually those ridges became tighter and more uniform and my 4-foot silk shrank by about 6 inches:

Next, I needed to add the metal thread that I was using as my core. Now, if I were doing this on my own, I would slip knot the metal thread to the awl before I undertwisted the silk and just keep it off to the side to make sure it didn't get twisted up with the silk. That's because the silk has to be held very taut the entire time or it will kink up. And there's no going back to tie something onto the awl because it takes two hands. 

But since Craig was helping me, I had him hold the twister while I added the metal thread. Alas, he was distracted by Beau, who adores Craig and demands to be held by him almost the entire time he's over. Craig didn't keep the silk quite taut enough, so it kinked up a little while I was tying on the metal core:

But it ended up being a handy lapse because now you know what it looks like when the thread kinks. I had to untwist it while tugging slightly to get rid of the kinks and then retwist it back to where I had it. Then it was time to slip knot my metal thread to the hook on the twister.

The metal core (or silk if you're using that) has to be longer than the twisted silk and hang down about 6–8 inches below the silk (for a 4–5-foot length). Here's a little diagram of what it should look like:

The blue line is the silk, and the gold line below it is the metal thread, with the Kreinik twister on the left and the awl on the right. Regardless of whether you use metal or silk for the core, it remains untwisted. Only the 5 or 6 lengths of silk get undertwisted first. 

The next step was to start overtwisting the undertwisted silk and the untwisted metal thread by turning the handle in a counterclockwise direction:

 This caused the metal thread to gradually twist up and around the silk:

Eventually, the metal pulled very tight and began to cause the silk to puff up around it:

This overtwist has to be a pretty hard twist, so I twisted quite a lot. When it got to be very pearl-like (almost like little beads of silk), I took it off the twister and stuffed the end through an unseparated set of chopsticks:

Then I wrapped the silk around the chopsticks, going over the end once or twice to hold it but then afterward not overlapping the thread again:

When I got to the end of the thread, I took it off the awl and stuffed the end through the chopsticks, pulling it down a bit to keep it snug and tying a knot in the end to hold it:

Then I plunged the whole thing in water and let it sit for a minute or two to get really saturated:

Once it was soaked through, I took it out, blotted it on a towel, and left it to dry overnight:

And here is it what it looked like once it was dry:

It's pretty good (though not my best attempt). The ridges are fairly even, and the silk is puffy.

I feel at this point, though, that I should mention a couple tips and tricks I learned along the way:

1. Katayori is all somewhat trial and error. At first my silk didn't puff up enough, so I had to try shortening the metal core. But then it was too short, so the metal snapped during the overtwisting. So I had to make it a little longer again but not as long as the first time. You may have to experiment a bit with different core lengths to get it looking right.
2. I had better luck when using 16-suga silk. Now that most silk doesn't have that many suga per strand (10–12 suga is more common), the silk doesn't really puff up the way it should. So to compensate for this, I used 7–8 strands when I was working with 10-suga silk. That really helped a lot.
3. Once you stitch it down, the silk seems to puff up a bit more — maybe because it's more relaxed? I'm not entirely sure, but it does tend to look a little better after it's stitched than when it's on a spool or a set of chopsticks.
4. If you've bought katayori from the JEC before, don't compare your handmade katayori to theirs. They use a machine to twist it, so yours is never going to look exactly like theirs. They can achieve really hard ridges of perfectly even, twisted thread, but the handmade katayori looks a little softer.
5. If you don't want to use metal thread, you can use a half strand of silk, or alternatively, just some plain silk couching thread. They all work, but in my opinion, the metal looks the best because of the shine.

I think that about covers the process and all the tips I have. If anyone else has further tips or tricks, please feel free to add them to the comments!