Hi Craftsters,
I'm not in the lucky position of being able to buy a lot of Japanese craft books, but I do love looking at the
Flickr stream for ideas, and checking out
Crafting Japanese for what people are making.
However, for those of you who are in a purchasing position, some of the info below might be helpful. Basically, you can find a lot more items if you search using Japanese characters, either the Kanji (漢字 - the complicated symbols) or the Hiragana/Katakana - (ぬいぐるみ).
I've done a more detailed post about this on
my blog, and I'm going to keep updating the word list there. I'll try to remember to do it here as well, and if you have any word requests please let me know below!
I recommend searching with
Google.co.jp (and then clicking images to see if you're hitting the right topic), then going back and exploring, or
Amazon.co.jp| Kanji | Hiragana/Katakana | Romaji | English |
| 雑貨 | ざっか | zakka | general merchandise |
| 刺し子 | さしこ | sashiko | quilting/sashiko |
| 織物 | おりもの | orimono | fabric/textile |
| 人形 | にんぎょう | ningyo | doll |
| 小芥子 | こけし | kokeshi | kokeshi doll |
| 縫いぐるみ | ぬいぐるみ | nuigurumi | stuffed doll or toy |
| 財布 | さいふ | saifu | wallet |
| 手細工 | てざいく | tezaiku | handicraft/homemade |
| 手作り | てづくり | tedukuri | hand-crafted/homemade |
| 糸 | いと | ito | thread or yarn |
| - | ホームメイド or ホームメード | homumeido | homemade |
| - | バッグ | baggu | bag |
| - | ソックス | sokkusu | socks |
| - | トートバッグ | totobaggu | tote bag |
| - | ファブリック | faburikku | fabric |
| - | コットンタイム | kotton taimu | Cotton Time |
Note:
Hiragana is phonetic spelling out of Japanese words.
Katakana (the squarer symbols) are used for foreign loan-words, many of which are English. If you say "sokkusu", really fast and de-emphasise the 'u' at the end, it does sound a lot like 'socks'!
ps. if you can't see the characters above, but just a lot of weird stuff, try doing this:
Firefox: View -> Character Encoding -> select 'Unicode (UTF-8)
IE: sorry, seems like you can see Kanji with Unicode selected, but you may need to install the Japanese language pack to see the Hiragana /Katakana? Might be simpler to just install Firefox!
