Today I made a kumihimo bobbin for finished cord in progress. (You can duplicate it yourself on a laser cutter with the files here.)

I'm using embroidery thread that I inherited from my auntie to make 12 strand cord for future drawstring bags. There are many partial skeins of thread in a lot of different colours, so I'm aiming to just do pretty patterns with nice colour combinations until I get through the whole box. I'm about halfway through, so far.

Changing colours is great, when you get to the end of a thread you just drop it and start a new one without tying any knots or doing anything complicated. The other 11 threads hold the cord together and stop the loose ends from coming unravelled, so you can just snip the ends close to the cord.

However, you can only change one thread at a time (like, one thread change per inch maximum) without making the cord unstable. So, the change between patterns is gradual. One of twelve threads changes every 1-3 inches, which means several inches of pattern chaos in between the sensible patterns.

With its literal translation/meaning of 'gathered threads', it is an ancient Japanese artform, ranging across means and significance throughout Japanese history.

The first records of anything similar date back to the Jomon period, when what is now Japan was occupied by a hunter-gatherer societies, and the threads were braided and pressed into unfired pottery to add patterns to the clay before they dried.

Kumihimo as it is properly recognised first came to Japan from China, initially used to adorn Buddhist scrolls and other religious items.

Japanese kumihimo came into its own after the trade routes with China faded out, and previous techniques were merged to create an individual practice, rather than the Chinese-taught version, becoming increasingly complex. This was when it began to be used to adorn samurai armour, and tie harnesses around the samurai's waist for their sword.

Moving forward in time, weavers developed a technique known for the gradual colour gradient throughout the piece. Onward again, and with the growing presence of wabi-sabi ideas, striped patterns came into practice, along with it being used to decorate teaware used in tea ceremonies. Onward again, and family emblems could be included, with the use of two distinct colours.

Onwards, guess what, again, and with increasing peace in Japanese societies, swords, in some contexts, became decorative, and kumihimo was key in decorating them for display, with frames being developed to assist in the range of kumihimo techniques available, and became more accessible across class differences, as fashion, and eventually decorative kumihimo variants specialised into being used on the obi (the belt for a kimono), able to include complex patterns and even characters into the kumihimo weave.

After the disappearance of the samurai regiment/class (what do I call it?), and the need for swords became obsolete, it remained all but entirely to decorate the obi.

Coming into the 20th and 21st centuries, in addition to retaining it's now-traditional use in the obi, has become decorative once, more, expanding out of Japan, including the establishment of kumihomo societies in foreign counties to oversee the craft.