NONA: Rika’s Kitchen, Plant-Dyed Colour and the World of Temari

A box of NONA thread looks a little like a collection of weather: a soft grey beside a muted rose, a deeper colour waiting underneath. The colours begin with plants. The story begins with a maker working in her kitchen, and with the small embroidered balls called temari.

1. Rika, a kitchen and a new beginning

NONA’s own introduction traces its beginnings to Rika’s work on temari and plant dyeing at home. After TEMARICIOUS dissolved in spring 2021, she established NONA to continue that work under a new name. The announcement is dated 9 May 2021. It is a recent brand with a personal beginning, carrying an older form of handwork into a new chapter. NONA’s account of its beginnings.

There is something particularly approachable about a story that begins at a kitchen rather than a large industrial plant. A skein is a finished material for the person who buys it, but for the dyer it is also a record of decisions: which colours to put together and how those colours might be used by somebody else. Looking at the threads in that way gives each small bundle a second life before the first stitch is made.

2. What sits inside a temari?

NONA describes making the core with rice husks wrapped in thin paper, then using its plant-dyed threads to build the embroidered surface. The ball is a structure as well as a pattern: a soft centre, a wrapped ground and lines of stitching that become a design. The brand identifies temari as the central part of its work. Materials and the meaning of NONA.

The contrast is lovely to think about. The husks and paper disappear from view; the thread is what we see. Yet the hidden centre makes the visible geometry possible. A finished temari invites you to turn it around in your hand and follow a line until it meets another. There is no single front to the object and no one direction in which to read the pattern.

Explore this part of the story: Nona – Naturally Hand-Dyed Threads Set in Special Box.

3. A thread can carry a landscape

At its Nishi-Ogikubo base in Tokyo, NONA describes extracting colour from plants to create hundreds of shades. Its separate NONA Stories collection makes the relationship between colour and storytelling explicit: regular labels identify the dye plant, while the Stories threads use graduated colours to express a landscape, an experience or the maker’s thoughts. NONA’s studio introduction, the NONA Stories concept.

That is a useful invitation to the person sewing, too. A palette does not have to begin with the exact colour of an object. It might begin with the feeling of a winter walk, a faded garden or the tones in a piece of cloth already at home. Put two threads beside each other, move one away, introduce a third: the relationship changes before you have sewn anything.

4. From the studio to your own handwork

NONA also teaches temari through its classes. The teaching, completed temari and threads belong to the same practice: making an object, making the materials for it and helping someone else begin. The brand’s class page provides the current teaching information.

For a first exploration of the Eight Needles thread box, try laying the skeins on the cloth you intend to use. View them in daylight and then separate a few favourites. A small stitched sample is more informative than judging a whole project from the wound skein: the cloth around a stitch becomes part of the colour arrangement. Keep that sample with a note of the thread you used. This is a way to explore a palette, rather than a prescribed NONA pattern.

5. Take a colour story home

Our NONA selection is a thread set in a special box. It is a way into the material side of the maker’s practice; the wider NONA world also includes finished temari, teaching and individual thread collections. The box below is the selection offered by Eight Needles, with its contents explained on the product page.

See NONA’s own studio film on its homepage. The film is presented by the maker alongside its introduction to plant-dyed thread.

6. Explore the collection by category

Explore by category

Naturally dyed thread selection

Nona – Naturally Hand-Dyed Threads Set in Special BoxView details & options →

Words: Eight Needles. Historical, workshop and product images are credited in their captions. Company and manufacturing sources are linked beside the relevant passages. Historical and manufacturing sources are linked beside the relevant passages. Product links open the live Eight Needles shop.