When thinking of Chinese craft, delicate silk embroidery immediately comes to mind. But Yiran Duan, founder of Yi Crafts, is determined to show the sheer diversity of handicrafts that exist across her home country, and indeed, in her hometown of Dali, southwest China. “We have weaving, indigo dyeing, pottery, wood carving, silver work,” she says of the mountainous region.
Duan—who is from the Bai ethnic minority group—grew up on an indigo farm that goes back five generations, with her family’s business producing handwoven, hand-dyed fabrics. As a young child, she would help out with cutting the threads after fabrics had been dyed, although she admits she didn’t place value on learning the craft at the time. “Young people want to leave the village; they want to go to the big cities,” Duan, who is wearing a beautiful denim jacket that was hand-dyed by her grandmother, explains from her airy north London studio. “They don’t really see this as a valuable skill; they see it as hard labor, a way of making a living.”
It was only when Duan went to study costume design at London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama that she began to embrace the indigo dyeing techniques that she’d grown up with. “I learned a lot of Western techniques, like making a suit, a Victorian dress, a corset—but I lost that [sense of] connection, because I don’t have a history associated with [those garments],” she recalls. “So I started to explore the possibility of, for example, using an indigo shibori-dyed fabric to make a Victorian dress and my tutor really encouraged me to keep going with [experimenting with] traditional Chinese techniques and Western pattern cutting.”
After graduating in 2019, Duan decided to set up her own studio to promote traditional Chinese craft and culture. “As [someone from] a Chinese ethnic minority, I find craft is a very good medium to share culture,” she explains. “For me, culture is invisible; you can’t touch culture, but you can touch fabric.”
Shortly afterwards, the pandemic hit—so Duan adjusted by sending clients sewing kits in the post and holding online workshops via Zoom. “During Covid, a lot of people were stuck at home but doing a session like that, they felt very connected to [others] just via a simple needle and thread,” she reflects, adding that it was a time when people were “forced to slow down.”
Fast forward to today, and I am also learning to slow down—partly thanks to my embarrassing lack of basic sewing skills. I’m taking part in one of Duan’s “Shibori: Stitch Resist” workshops. While shibori is the Japanese term, the indigo dyeing technique has also long existed in the likes of China, India, and western Africa. It’s called zha-ran in Mandarin, but, as Duan explains, she has to advertise the class as shibori, otherwise “no one will know what I’m talking about.”
There’s a meditative quality to the day spent away from screens, as we stitch away while Duan talks to us about the cultural heritage of the techniques we’re learning. We learn how to stitch particular patterns—such as the spider web (my personal favorite) and horse teeth—into our linen cloth, before pulling the stitches together to create resistance and then bathing them in natural indigo dye. As if by magic, when we cut the threads and unravel the cloth, we’re left with beautiful, imperfect patterns where the dye hasn’t been able to reach.
Shibori is not the only workshop offered at Yi Crafts: there’s also embroidery, sashiko (a Japanese stitching technique), natural dyeing, woodblock printing, paper cutting, and more, with Duan also partnering with the likes of the Victoria Albert Museum to share her work. Later this month, she’ll be taking a group of around 12 back to her hometown of Dali, so they can see first-hand the artisans at work. “I want to give the mic back to the people who have carried on traditional crafts for so many generations, and I want people here to be able to access that,” she says.
Beyond sharing her culture with others and helping to keep traditional craft alive, Duan wants us all to rebuild our sense of connection with our textiles and our clothes. “In modern society, we take a lot of things for granted; [you] don’t realize the amount of labor that went into an item,” she says. After spending a day in her studio, it’s safe to say: mission accomplished.