Violet Seigaiha Furoshiki 'Sumirenami'

Violet furoshiki cloth printed with the overlapping-wave pattern in purples and pink with gold

The wave pattern, in purples. This cloth is printed edge to edge with the overlapping scales of the seigaiha, the oldest wave pattern in Japanese cloth, each scale drawn in concentric lines and coloured in violet, purple, pink or wine, with gold outlining every one. The colours change from scale to scale, so the pattern reads as a field of purple from a distance and as a mosaic from close.

It is the first of the four wave cloths in the collection, and the one in the colour of a wisteria.

The name, Sumirenami, is the violet wave, and the cloth is a sea of them.

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 concentric lines are the detail: each scale is drawn as five or six curves inside one another in a darker shade, and the gold outline sits on the outermost, so the pattern has the depth of a shell. The scales are the size of a thumbnail.

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 purple cloth with a scale texture. From close the scales show their lines, the gold its outline, and the colours their change. It is the cloth for a gift to a person who wears purple, and for a table in the evening.

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.