Hana-Kanzashi: How We Make Them

A hana-kanzashi (花簪) is a kanzashi built from fabric flowers — small squares of silk, folded one at a time into petals, then assembled into a flower. It's the type of kanzashi we make almost exclusively, and this article is a plain walk-through of how one actually gets built, from a bolt of silk to a finished piece.

If you're looking for a general introduction to kanzashi as a category, start with our guide to what a kanzashi is or our breakdown of kanzashi types.

Step 1: cutting the silk

Everything starts with pure silk fabric — habutae or chirimen, sourced from within Kyoto Prefecture. The fabric is cut into small squares, and the size of the square determines the size of the finished petal. A single flower can call for dozens of squares in the same size, or several different sizes if the flower has layered petals of different scale.

Step 2: folding, one petal at a time

This is the step people mean when they say tsumami-zaiku (a Japanese art of folding small squares of silk into flower petals). There's no mold and no machine stamping petals into shape — each square is folded by hand with tweezers.

Every petal comes down to one of two base folds: maru-tsumami (rounded, used for soft flowers like plum and cherry blossom) or ken-tsumami (pointed, used for crisp flowers like chrysanthemum). We've written a separate article that breaks down exactly where these two folds diverge, step by step.

Maru-tsumami vs. ken-tsumami: the two basic folds

A folded petal is trimmed and set with paste at its base to hold the fold permanently before it goes anywhere near the flower it will become part of.

Step 3: mounting petals onto an ochirin

Individual petals are mounted onto a small round base called an ochirin, arranged in a ring, one petal overlapping the next, until the base is fully covered. This is where a flower starts to take shape — the angle and spacing of each petal is set by hand, and it's the step that determines whether the finished flower looks even or lopsided.

A single kanzashi can use a large number of these flower units. Some of our pieces use more than 120 petals on one comb across all their flowers combined.

Step 4: assembly with itowaku

The individual flower units are then brought together into the finished piece using itowaku, a Nishijin thread-spool technique for binding and arranging multiple flowers onto a comb, pin, or base. This is a distinctly Kyoto method of construction — a different approach from the Edo-tsumami tradition practiced elsewhere in Japan. It's also the step where the overall composition of the piece — how the flowers cluster, cascade, or balance against each other — gets decided.

Step 5: finishing

The last step is fitting the assembled flowers onto their base — a comb, pin, U-pin, or clip, depending on how the piece is meant to be worn — and a final check of every petal's angle and set before the piece leaves the workshop.

Made in-house, start to finish

Every stage above — dyeing, cutting, folding, and assembly — happens in our own workshop in Nishijin, Kyoto. Nothing is outsourced partway through. We're also one of only two shops in Kyoto certified by the City of Kyoto for hana-kanzashi under its Certified Kyoto Handcraft Store program, a certification tied directly to this in-house process.

Over the past ten years, more than 10,000 people have made a hana-kanzashi with us in our hands-on classes — folding their own first petals with the same tweezers and the same two base folds described above.

About Oharibako (Kyoto)

Oharibako has been making kanzashi and kimono accessories in Nishijin, Kyoto, for 80 years, now in its third generation. We source our pure silk from within Kyoto Prefecture and assemble every piece using itowaku, a distinctly Kyoto method of construction, entirely in our own workshop.

More about Oharibako

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Browse tsumami-zaiku kits

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