My mom never did fill in more than a few pages of my baby book, but I don’t take it personally. By the time she had me, her second child, she was preoccupied with more pressing things than noting my first word. (“No” is easy enough to remember anyway.)
She made good when I moved into my first solo apartment by giving me an album that she’d filled with family recipes collected over the years. This is no precious antique book handed down over centuries—it’s a three-ring binder from the 2000s with those transparent peel-away covers on every page—but I still treasure it. It contains a mix of recipes printed on the backs of pieces of scrap computer paper, handwritten on index cards, and preserved as torn-out magazine pages. The real gift, as I see it, are the annotations my mom scribbled on every recipe in her looping script, letting me know how to make something vegetarian, when to skip the nutmeg, or if I should cut the amount of butter.
I come from a family of great cooks and eaters, but if I’d been born into a family of weavers instead, the album I was handed when I moved out might have been a shima-cho. A shima-cho is a textile sample book from Japan’s Edo period (1615–1868) that collected samples of a family’s home weavings and was given to newly married brides so they could re-create the same patterns in their new homes. In a sense, they too contained family recipes.
Shima-cho means “stripe book,” and the most interesting examples I find digitally archived online or available to buy through vintage dealers have pages chockablock with small scraps of indigo-dyed woven fabrics in myriad stripe patterns. Occasionally other patterns are found in these books (like checks or trippy kasuri weave), but stripes dominate because they were one of the few approved patterns during the Edo Period when sumptuary laws dictated that most people were only allowed to wear somber colors with very little pattern.
I’m drawn to the distinctly handmade quality of shima-cho. Unlike contemporary swatch books that privilege orderliness through pages of neat textile squares offset by clean white borders, a shima-cho has swatches that are hand-cut—irregularly sized and frayed at the edges. Each piece of cloth is collaged together so closely, with little to no space in between, that the books lose the feeling of a sampler entirely. Every densely patterned page becomes an individual work of art. I see them in conversation with the quilts of Gee’s Bend and with Louise Bourgeois’s flat textile works, both of which used a lot of stripes.
The books themselves are “nothing special”—recycled notebooks or old novels whose kanji lettering runs vertically down the pages, peeking out from behind the swatches. Perhaps this foundation is why I see these striped textiles resembling lines of text, each swatch its own sentence whose letters are written in linear tategaki (“vertical writing”) style. I imagine that—much as anyone who does not share my last name might have trouble reading my mom’s handwritten recipe notes—these stripe books might be all but indecipherable to anyone outside the family.
Erin Wylie is a writer based in Oakland, California. She is the co-creator of the newsletter Blackbird Spyplane.
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