I made this with fabric I found at Kitataka, a manufacturer of printed fabrics. This printed fabric is made using rotary printing. Rotary printing uses a cylindrical plate to print a continuous pattern without any breaks. I had never actually seen rotary printing in action, so I went to a factory in Nagoya to cover the process. Rotary printing plates use metal plates with small holes. After sealing the holes with something like wax, the wax is melted only in the areas you want to print, allowing the dye to come out. The holes are not round but hexagonal like a honeycomb, and several types of plates with different hole sizes are used depending on the area you want to print and the thinness of the lines. The difficult thing about making plates is that when tracing the design onto the plate, you have to calculate the bleeding and change the thickness of the lines. Apparently, a line that is 0.1 mm on the plate becomes about 0.5 mm when printed. Another thing is the change in color due to the plates being overlapped. Basically, the colors are printed in order from dark to dark, but if you layer colors on top of each other, the areas will become lighter, so the craftsman must use his many years of experience to decide whether it's okay to layer them or whether to scrape the bottom block so that they don't overlap. If you scrape it, there's a risk of the blocks shifting, so that must be taken into consideration as well. The fabric made using this technique was made into a skirt. The pattern is of dead branches, but the finished garment has a warm feel to it.