Temari Rabbit Furoshiki 'Usagimari'

Furoshiki cloth printed with patterned temari balls and white rabbits on red

Thread balls and rabbits. This cloth is a red ground printed edge to edge with temari, the embroidered thread balls of a Japanese childhood, each one in a different pattern, stars, hexagons, stripes, flowers, in reds, blues, greens and golds, with white rabbits sitting among them here and there. It is the most playful print in the collection, and the rabbits are what make it.

It is the cloth for a gift to a child, or to an adult who was one in Japan.

The name, Usagimari, is the rabbit and the thread ball, the two things on the cloth, and the name is a list.

The cloth is a fine, close-woven fabric with a soft hand and a little body, printed with the design in full colour, and the print runs to the hem on all four sides. 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 rabbits are the detail: white, round, with pink ears and a red eye, sitting sideways among the balls at intervals, and they are small enough that a child finds them one at a time. No two temari on the cloth share a pattern.

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 red cloth with round patches of colour. From close the patches are thread balls, each shows its pattern, and the rabbits their ears. It is the cloth for a birthday, a lunch box and a person who collects temari.

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.