Among the many blessings of my life in Kyoto, my friendship with Judith Clancy, author of Exploring Kyoto is definitely quite high on the list. Aside from the pleasure of her company, her enthusiasm for life and all that it offers has given her a knowledge base that she willingly and readily shares. No matter what I’ve wanted to do, who I’ve wanted to meet or where I’ve wanted to go, Judith always knows the best and most enjoyable way to get there, who I should see and when would be the best time to go.
Having lived in Kyoto since 1970, Judith eagerly embraced the culture, studying a wide range of Japanese arts. And over the years, she’s become certified in Tea ceremony and well-practiced in the art of ikebana as well as interpretor for a number of international culture groups and translator for several books on Japanese textiles.
All of this knowledge and love for Japanese culture and the city of Kyoto has been distilled into a wonderful Kyoto City guidebook called Exploring Kyoto — on foot in the ancient capital. With the recent release of it’s third printing, the book has been newly revised and updated throughout. Exploring Kyoto will not only provide its readers with a walking guide through Kyoto’s streets and neighborhoods but also guide the reader through the exotic history of one of Asia’s most ancient cities. A quick peek at the reviews on Amazon will show you that it’s also the guide that even we Kyoto residents buy and use.
As an avid traveler herself, Judith can truly appreciate the finer points of tourism — those little details that make traveling a joy instead of a hassle — and she brings that perspective to bear in operating Kyoto Workshops, her own Kyoto-based tour business. Always mindful of the varying needs and interests of her clients, she has successfully arranged personalized tours for a wide range of tastes — Chinese dignitaries, martial arts enthusiasts, and art conoisseurs to name a few.
When not busy guiding private tours or writing her next book on Kyoto restaurants, Judith makes herself at home in an old Nishijin weaver’s studio that she remodeled into a beautiful home nestled in a tiny back alley near Myorenji Temple. Preserving the high beamed ceilings of the weaving studio but installing heated flooring to protect against the cold damp of Kyoto winters, she has turned her home into a perfect backdrop not only for her fabulous art collection but also her exquisite flower arrangements, both of which she changes constantly to reflect the season in perfect Kyoto style.
Maiko are apprentice geisha and their elaborate kimono are much more ornate and theatrical than those worn by the average Japanese woman. As befitting a young woman, the kimono are 
exercised by fully trained geisha, their duties mostly involve music and dance performances, which accounts for the colorful theatrical style of their kimono.
Maiko kimono are of course frequently decorated with brightly colored flowers and butterflies, but literary motifs are also common as are symbols of a traditional lifestyle. The blue kimono above features decorated clam shells, representing the kai awase game that was popular during the Heian era in the 11th century. Similar to the card game “Concentration”, the game used sets of clamshells rather than cards. Matching scenes were painted on the interior surfaces of each pair of shells, while the exterior surfaces were polished to a smooth blank, making hard to recognize which pairs would go together when all of the clamshells were placed with the painted side down. Some of the older sets contained as many as 360 pairs of shells, though simplified sets of 54 pairs based on scenes from Tale of Genji later became popular.
On the far right are my friends, Kiyomi Yatsuhashi and 
Kyoto abounds with wonderful textile traditions that have been skillfully blended to create treasures like the 19th century kimono shown above, where the subtle use of dyes have created a wispy cloud-like texture as the background for this fabulous embroidered garden. In its day, such a kimono was probably worn by a lady-in-waiting of the imperial court, but is now the property of Kyoto National Museum.
Smaller exhibitions of embroidery shown at Shishu-Yakata, The Embroidery Museum and School of Kyoto include both modern and historical pieces. A 40-minute course in Japanese-style hand embroidery is offered at a nominal fee. The museum school also offer classes in making a Japanese pastry called Yatsuhachi-an, a fresh rice flour dough filled with sweetened bean paste.
The classical Japanese embroidery used to decorate kimono worn by members of the imperial court was adapted from techniques that spread from China and Korea some 12 to 13 hundred years ago and requires the mastery of approximately 46 different stitches or stitch combinations. These elegant embroideries are generally stitched with a fine silk filament on silk or a fine linen-like ramie and featuring birds, flowers or scenes from poetry or classical literature. 
Cherry blossom time is such a special season in Japan, I’m glad to have gotten home in time to enjoy it. The trees in the park near my home, and indeed all over the city, seem to suddenly burst with blooms and everywhere there are picnics with happy people enjoying the advent of spring. It is good to be home after my travels.And where, you might ask, have I been? Where else but the American Embroidery Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, of course.
After a year of anticipation and months of preparation, I spent last week seeing old friends and making new ones at the annual AEC. And what a conference it was, with tons of opportunities to learn from each other and from the marvelous line up of teachers organized by Dianne Pomeroy, the AEC conference coordinator.I studied Embird Studio with Amy Webster, multi-hooping with Jeannie Miller, problem solving with Terri Hanson, embroidered a shawl under the guidance of Santi from Hatched in Africa, and was inspired to achieve greater heights of style by Bobbi Bullard and Sue Lord.
There was a bright glow in my bedroom when I opened my eyes this morning. That light and the particularly cold nip in the air told me before I even looked out the window that it had snowed during the night. At left you can see the snapshot I took from my upstairs window. Snow covered the tiled roof of my house and dusted the camelia trees of the temple across the street.
For over a thousand years, Kyoto has been the textile capital of Japan and my house in Kyoto is on the edge of Nishijin, the silk weaving district of old Kyoto. Although the number of weaving families has diminished, there are still places where I can still hear the thumping of the heddles and slap, slap of the weaving shuttle sliding back and forth across the loom as I bike around the narrow back streets of my neighborhood. The Nishijin style of weaving uses yarn dyeing, in which yarns of various colors are woven into intricate patterns. This technique is both time-consuming and labor intensive compared to other styles of weaving, but it is indispensable for creating the elaborate designs required for kimono fabric. Despite considerable evolution of kimono styles throughout the ages, Nishijin has remained a major production center for high quality textiles.
By the Heian era when the Japanese capital was moved from Nara to Kyoto around 1200 years ago, silk weaving had evolved to a highly complex art catering to the tastes of a sophisticated aristocracy. The most intricate of Heian era kimono could have as many as twenty layers of fabric. Although this type of kimono, called a “juni-hito” or twelve-layer, has disappeared from common use, it is still used for the most ultra-formal of ceremonies such as the wedding of Masako-sama to Crown Prince Naruhito in 1993.