Glassworkers in Cohana’s Kinari collaboration feature. Photograph: Cohana / Kinari Glass. A flower inside a glass pinhead. A tassel tied to tiny scissors. A ceramic button that holds a needle. Open a Cohana sewing box and several different Japanese workshops are represented in the space of your palm. The interesting part is finding out who […]

A worker tending thread-processing machinery in DARUMA’s official factory feature. Photograph: Yokota / DARUMA. A bright yellow hank passes through a worker’s hands. Elsewhere, pale thread runs through machinery and a small flame removes loose fibres. Before a DARUMA colour reaches a sashiko sampler, it has already travelled through a sequence of decisions about twist, […]

Historical photographs, needle packaging and tools in Misuya Chubei’s official heritage collage. The eye is tiny; the history behind it is much larger. Misuya Chubei has been a Kyoto needle business since 1819, with roots in Japanese dressmaking and a range that reaches into quilting, embroidery and sashiko. Look closely at a needle’s eye and […]

Students sewing in an archive classroom photograph. Photograph: Bunka Fashion College. Before the red tool bag, before the curve ruler, there was a question: could the skills of a dressmaker be taught more widely? Bunka’s story begins with people who thought they could. Its archive leads from a small teaching business to classrooms, books and […]

Choosing threads from a fabric box in Eight Needles’ NONA photography. 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 […]

Shozaburo tailor shears with their presentation box. A name on a blade. A pair kept by a tailor for years. Silk braid wrapped around a small set of snips. Shozaburo’s story can be followed through objects and the people who make, maintain and use them. 1. A name attached to a making tradition Shozaburo’s shears […]

Clover’s original 1925 store, identified in its centenary archive. Photograph: Clover. A leaf kept inside a book became the mark on a sewing-tool company. Clover’s founding story moves from a young man arriving in Osaka to a shop, the destruction of war and a decision to make better needles. The familiar green name has a […]

Yoshio Okada, OLFA’s founder, pictured in the company’s invention story. Photograph: OLFA. A fresh cutting edge without throwing the whole blade away: that was the problem Yoshio Okada set out to solve. OLFA’s story has the ingredients of a good invention tale—an everyday frustration, an unexpected idea and prototypes that needed work. It eventually led […]

Saijiro Endo II, identified in KAI’s historical exhibition. Photograph: KAI. A long pair of sewing shears and a small folding knife look like distant relatives. In KAI’s history, they belong to branches of the same cutting-tool business. Follow the company back through its archive and the story begins in Seki, with Saijiro Endo in 1908. […]

Participants making things together in KAWAGUCHI’s event report. Photograph: KAWAGUCHI. What connects a repaired jacket, a pocket-sized loom and a glass-headed pin? Behind them is KAWAGUCHI, a company whose work follows several routes into making things. Some begin with a practical sewing problem. Others begin with a material, a regional workshop or someone trying a […]