Nimai Gata — Engineering as Design

You were never supposed to see this, but I am glad you can. One delight of katagami is that there are sometimes qualities in the pattern that never were intended to land on the cloth. Nimai Gata are just such an instance. The term ‘Nimai Gata’ refers to two pages. Sometimes the needs of the pattern can compromise the structure of the tool. When the design can’t be achieved with a single stencil, add another stencil with a supplemental design. Nimai Gata allows the technical support of one page to be removed in printing the next. This support system for small elements was created by the carver, not the designer and was never intended to be an aesthetic element in the cloth. In the surviving stencils, the effect is a dynamic abstraction that follows the movement of the pattern, a little like van Gogh’s directional line drawings. View the collection.