The Yosegire — Japanese Ceremonial Silk Bed Runner Set, Woven Patchwork in Rust, Gold, Teal and Lilac

It looks like a patchwork of six silks. It is one silk. The seams are in the loom.

A Japanese ceremonial silk bed runner set, runner and cushions cut from one obi at the Renaras atelier in Amsterdam.

Yosegire — cloth pieced from gathered fragments — began as thrift and became a taste of its own. Here the piecing is woven rather than sewn: panels of unrelated pattern, floral scroll, key-fret, dotted ground and fields of small blossom, butted together in rust, gold, teal, lilac and ochre, each panel carrying its own weight of thread, metallic in some and matte in others. Nothing repeats along the length. The reverse is patterned too, so the runner can be turned.

Renaras designs and reimagines existing Japanese ceremonial silk into contemporary pieces for daily life — this is the Renaras mottainai: the bringing of new imagination into a living tradition. Woven once for ceremony, the obi was cut at the Renaras atelier in Amsterdam into a runner for the foot of the bed, 220 cm of it, falling over both sides of a 160 or 180 cm mattress, with four cushions for the head: two in the patchwork, two in plain gold silk.

The runner is finished to show both faces; each cushion closes with an envelope pocket, and no metal touches the silk anywhere.

The set arrives with the Renaras Passport, a small handmade record of the silk's first life and its transformation, signed and dated in Amsterdam.

One silk. One story. One piece. Never repeated.