Katagami stencil depicting fans and cherry blossom floating in a stream

Folding fans are an auspicious motif representing the unfolding of the future or of good fortune in their opening. Motifs depicted on the fans include cherry blossom, baskets of flowering plants with butterflies, a landscape with a building and a pine tree, bamboo and a sparrow. Bamboo and sparrows are a common pairing - both are associated with virtuosity sparrows with the repayment of obligations and bamboo with strength and flexibility. There may also be a link to the folktale of the sparrow with the slit tongue in which the sparrow is found in a bamboo grove. This stencil is of the sansun okuri or koban size class (determined by the repeat length). This is one of around 400 Japanese katagami stencils which are part of the Silver Studio Collection. The stencils were produced in Japan as a way of applying patterns to fabric, mainly kimonos. The katagami collected by the Silver Studio were used by their designers as reference material to produce their own Japanese-inspired patterns.