This stencil features sakura flowers inside Japanese style snowflakes, falling through matsuawabishi / まつかわびし [松皮菱] – pine bark diamond pattern. The matsukawabishi motif mimics the split pattern of Japanese pine bark.
I’m not sure if this was a summer or winter motif, as snowflakes often show up on summer patterns to keep the wearer cool (the theory being that looking at cold things makes you feel cooler). Because it’s a larger pattern, I think it might have been a summer pattern, not a winter one.
There’s been a slight delay in posts, but I wanted to explain that this stencil was restored algorithmically – not with AI, but with a series of morphological (shape) filters to isolate the ito-ire reinforcement, and then a few more manual photoshop filters and vector smoothing filters. The only part I restored by hand was the worm-eaten bit at the top. It’s not a perfect restoration, and not as good as a human hand, but it’s a good start and it allows us to visualize the pattern very well.
This is something I hope to carry into the future, and perhaps make a separate post about when I can get get it working as a script instead of in a series of programs.