Tomomi Mimura & The Magic of Mosaic Embroidery
The close-up video shows a set of nimble fingers and a needle going over and then under some long parallel floats on a piece of fabric. Little by little, a sort of grid appears, reminiscent of woven baskets. Many knitters might be familiar with this technique after using it to darn socks, but this time it’s used for something a lot more fun.
Gradually, the grids of darning stitches form tiny spots of colour, together creating a kind of embroidered mosaic. And when you look closely enough, you see what it depicts: the face of a charming little bear!
The hands are those of Tomomi Mimura, and the video is from her Instagram account (@mimstermade), which has more than 34 000 followers. Tomomi is a self-taught embroidery artist known in particular for what she calls mosaic embroidery, a technique she has developed herself. She uses it to create darned spots of various shapes and sizes that together form colourful animal figures – everything from chubby-cheeked hamsters and flying birds to cats stretching themselves. The cute and playful look of the creatures reminds you of children’s drawings or naïve art.
Tomomi lives with her husband in the city of Chiba just outside Tokyo. Before her current career, she worked as a reflexologist for 18 years, but for the past years, she has devoted herself to mosaic embroidery. Besides designing and doing needlework, she runs workshops and writes books about the subject.
Tomomi’s goal is to help others find the same joy and relaxation that crafting has brought to her own life.
“In traditional embroidery, there are some pretty clear-cut rules and a particular process you need to follow. Mosaic embroidery is freer and you can reach the same result using different methods,” she explains.
Therapeutic Play of Colours
Tomomi knows very well how therapeutic crafting can be. She learned how to knit back when she was a child and later picked up the hobby in 2011. That’s when Japan was hit by a devastating earthquake, followed by a tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Thousands of people were killed and many more had to leave their homes. Tomomi was beset by a deep sense of anxiety.
“Making things with my hands helped me relax and feel a bit better, so I started knitting socks.” Embroidery entered her life a few years later, when she was again going through a rough period. Tomomi’s partner had bouts of panic disorder, and their home atmosphere was heavy. As before, Tomomi turned to crafting for help. Knitting had started to make her neck rather too stiff, but there was still lots of yarn left over. Tomomi decided to try her hand at darning.
After having run out of socks to mend, she tried the same stitches on fabric, resulting in some colourful textures.
“I was fascinated by the combinations of different colours, and that’s still what I most enjoy about my work. It gives me so much pleasure to see how the colours interact with one another. Doing that, I can just turn off my brain and not think about anything else.”
Around the same time, Tomomi was wondering how long she would be able to work as a reflexologist. You have to be in good shape to work in the profession, and Tomomi wasn’t that young anymore. Perhaps she could turn her embroidery hobby into a job? She felt, however, that she needed to find her own unique take on the craft first.
That happened about four years ago when she saw a TV programme about Park Güell in Barcelona. Designed by the world-famous Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, the area is full of buildings and statues adorned by ceramic mosaics.
“To me, that was like embroidery. The first thing I did in this style was an embroidered bear. Little by little I began selling my work, and its popularity blew me away: when I sold one piece, there was already someone wanting to buy the next one. I began to understand that other people really did like what I was doing.”
One turning point in Tomomi’s career was taking part in a local handcraft fair. In the booth next to her was a florist, who asked her to arrange a workshop in her Tokyo store. That, in turn, led to a famous bookshop inviting her to their event. The only trouble was that Tomomi didn’t have a book to sell. Through the bookseller she contacted a publisher, after which everything went quickly. So far, Tomomi has published three highly popular books in Japanese, which have sold nearly 100,000 copies in total.
This autumn, Laine Publishing releases Tiny Friends: A Guide to Mosaic Embroidery, her first book in English. In the book, she introduces the reader to 13 lovely animal toys worked in mosaic embroidery.
Room for imagination
Mosaic embroidery doesn’t require any special skills or materials. All you need to begin is an embroidery frame along with some fabric, yarn, a needle and a pair of scissors. Depending on the desired style of the piece, you can use a thin cotton yarn or a thicker woollen yarn – Tomomi’s personal favourite is a single-ply fingering-weight yarn. The technique can be used on almost any kind of fabric, the very thinnest and lightest ones excluded. As for knitted garments, it works best when applied to thinner knits rather than thick sweaters.
Mosaic embroidery can be used to decorate stuffed toys, clothing, accessories, jewellery or items of home decor. Nowadays, Tomomi may occasionally use other embroidery stitches to pepper her work, but darning is still the basis of it all. The technique is also ideal for patching up tears or hiding stains in a fun, visible way, and an easy method of using up even the tiniest bits of leftover yarn. These two aspects make mosaic embroidery eco-friendly as well.
Almost all of Tomomi’s embroidery designs depict animals, never people. This is a way of leaving more room for the imagination. When we humans look at animals, we are always observers and cannot ever really know what they’re thinking. As for people, we are more likely to form preconceptions based on someone’s age or looks.
“I make a point of having the animals sport quite neutral expressions, so different people may interpret my characters in different ways. Someone might look at an animal and think that it looks sad, and another might think it looks happy,” Tomomi says.
“For me, the best moment in my work is when I embroider the eyes. That’s when the animal’s personality comes out – it’s a bit like a child being born. This may sound crazy, but in that moment, I feel like my animals start talking to me. I think a work of art has a sort of consciousness of its own.”
From time to time, Tomomi goes to the zoo to find ideas, observing the animals’ movements and expressions. Another source of inspiration are her own roots. Tomomi comes from Okinawa, one of Japan’s southern islands. The subtropical area has a rich and diverse ecosystem with mangrove forests, coral reefs and beaches of white sand. Besides the nature, Tomomi finds inspiration from Okinawa’s handcraft tradition and culture.
“Even the definition of the colour red is different if you’re from Okinawa rather than Tokyo,” Tomomi explains.
Embroidered Individuals
Tomomi’s signature style is cute and somewhat childlike. She knew that in Asia, that sort of aesthetic appeals to adults, too, but finding interest in the rest of the world was unexpected. Judging by her Instagram followers, most of her audience is from Japan, America, Australia or Taiwan. Most are women, many of them around their forties. Quite a few aren’t even crafters themselves, they’re just fascinated by Tomomi’s visual world.
“Some of them tell me they just browse my books, looking at the photos to relax before going to sleep. A woman even told me her late mother was buried with one of my books, because she used to love it so much.”
Mosaic embroidery is easy to apply to different styles, and this freedom is vital to Tomomi. Even in her workshops, the goal isn’t to make a character exactly like the model design. One participant may pull the yarn tighter and another will have a looser hand, and it’s all OK, as long as it’s fun. Recently, Tomomi arranged a darn-along – a DAL, then – and when people shared their work on Instagram, some of the bears were chubby and some thin, and some had large eyes and some smaller ones
“Every morning, I checked out our hashtag to see the new personalities that had emerged. It was great!”
Tomomi finds a deeper meaning in this as well. Diversity is important to her, and through her work she wants to send out the message that each and every individual is beautiful, special and precious just the way they are. For her, crafting has been an empowering experience that has made her feel more confident. Tomomi says she is living the happiest time of her life.
“I used to be harder on myself, but I never realised it until I began to do handiwork. If someone else did the same thing as myself, I compared myself to them and thought I was worse. Now it’s easier for me to appreciate my work just like anybody else’s.”
In a way, Tomomi sees her embroidery work as a continuation of her former career.
“For me, giving people therapy is a natural thing to do. In my former job as a reflexologist, I helped people physically, whereas now it’s more mental. Crafting saved me, so I now want to use it to help others through it.”
Text: Maija Kangasluoma
Photos: Rika Wada
The original version of this feature was published in Laine issue 19.
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