Golden Crane Furoshiki Fabric 'Kinzuru'

Beige furoshiki cloth printed with white cranes in flight over brown chrysanthemums

Cranes over chrysanthemums, on beige. This cloth is a warm beige ground printed with white cranes in flight, their wings spread and their red crowns showing, over a field of chrysanthemums in brown, grey and gold, so the birds are the light thing on a dark pattern. The crane is the bird of long life and the chrysanthemum the flower of autumn, and the two together are the print of a formal kimono.

It is the cloth in the collection with the most tradition in it, and the beige is what keeps it from being a costume.

The name, Kinzuru, is the gold crane, the bird among the gold flowers, and the cloth is that.

The cloth is a fine, close-woven fabric with a soft hand and a little body, printed with the design and then with a metallic gold that sits on the surface as a line, so the pattern is flat and the gold catches light. It is the cloth of a Japanese print shop, the kind sold by the metre for kimono linings and bags.

Use it the way a furoshiki is used: tie it round a bottle with the ends knotted into a handle, wrap a box with the corners folded and tied, roll a lunch in it, or lay it down the middle of a table. Tied at the neck it is a scarf; hung from a rod it is a picture. The cloth is the gift and the wrapping, and it is used again.

The wings are the detail: each crane is drawn with its primaries spread and edged in black, and the birds fly in several directions so the print has no top. The chrysanthemums beneath are dense.

Hand wash cool or machine wash on a gentle cycle in a bag, and dry flat out of the sun, which is what the gold asks for; iron on the reverse on low. The print is fast and the metallic line stays through washing if it is not scrubbed.

From across a table it is a beige cloth with white birds on it. From close the birds show their wings and their crowns, the flowers their petals, and the gold its line. It is the cloth for a gift to a grandparent and a wall in a hallway.

It measures 50 by 145 cm, which is a rectangle, not the square of a traditional furoshiki, and we say so: it wraps a bottle or a long box the way a square does, and it runs down a table or ties round a neck the way a square does not. A single piece, hemmed on all four sides, one size.