Hi, I'm Alison, owner of Watts Sashiko in Adelaide, South Australia. I teach sashiko the way I learned it in Japan, where I lived for 35 years.

In Japan I used to have a blog called Watts Sashiko. I wrote about my encounters with sashiko in contemporary daily Japanese life, drawing on my skills as a translator to access primary Japanese sources for reviewing exhibitions and books. I also belonged to a sashiko group and wrote about my experiences learning and making it. I assembled an extensive collection of Japanese sashiko books and translated several for publication. In short, sashiko was my passion and I immersed myself in it.

Over the decades I have observed enormous change. Sashiko went from being a little known folk craft to becoming so well-known outside Japan that the word is now in the Oxford dictionary. At the same time, there has been an explosion of change in styles and trends. However, the fundamentals are still the same.

Now that I am back living in Australia my mission is to teach sashiko as I learned it in Japan and keep alive the knowledge of sashiko’s origins. That means starting with the basics and using simple tools, as Japanese people have done for centuries, the way I learned from my teacher, who learned it from her mother and teachers before her.

I am excited about this new stage in my journey and thrilled that there are so many sashiko fans in Australia to share my passion with. I look forward to meeting many of you!