Dip Dyed Dish

March 16, 2025

My neighborhood has a Japanese grocery store that happens to sell some home goods. They have an assortment of tea cups, tea pots, ceramic trays (like this one), bowls, etc. I go there a lot when I need a gift in a pinch because their wares are cute, inexpensive, and look a bit fancier than they are.

(As an aside, there’s a whole ecosystem of Japanese home goods circulating everywhere across the country. I think they mostly have one or two wholesale factories that sell Japanese home goods to every Japanese store in America lol. I’ve found some of the same stuff in New York that I’ve seen in California. I want to get straight to the source one day.)

While I was there picking out a gift for someone else, I saw this tray and bought it for myself. I thought it would be perfect for my keys, but I’ve never really used it for that. It’s just kind of… sat there. I think because I like the color palette so much.

The colors remind me of a rug I used to have out in the living room of my last two apartments. It’s too large for my current place but… I’m so attached to it and can’t part with it, and now it’s rolled up and standing in my closet collecting dust for when I might one day move to a place with a larger living room (lol).

You’re… telling me… I like muted blues and browns??? Wow I had no idea!

I’m not sure why I’m so drawn to the rug; it’s not like the pattern is amazing. But probably because rugs are a tricky thing where you want an interesting pattern, but for it to not be the star of the show, and this fits that criteria well.

Similarly to the rug, I like that this dish has visual interest, but not in a really loud way. When I bought it, I liked that it had four different colors, but eventually I realized that the process of adding the color was quite elegant.

I think there are four glazes applied to the tray by dipping each color only halfway across the tray. Two of the colors would be dipped vertically and the other two colors horizontally, forming quadrants of different appearances. The overlapping of these glazes provides colors that are inherently related to one another, but different enough to provide some contrast.

For the longest time I just assumed that the colors were painted into each quadrant individually, because that was just the first thing that came to mind. But it’s things like this dip dye job that make me really appreciate how craftsmen proceduralize the production process in really effective ways.

When I took bookbinding a lifetime ago in college, I learned that there were things to care about and things I didn’t have to sweat. And that was because following the proper procedure, I could cover up all of the messy parts of the book, like the glue, spine, attaching spreads together, etc. because the process of handmade book production accounts for these human mistakes and then obfuscates them within the end result of the craft.

More recently, I took a rug tufting workshop and I did a pretty bad job creating my rug design, but all was forgiven because the yarn was superglued together and had a rubber grip mat affixed to the back.

Things like this tray remind me of the ingenuity and often built in steps of preventing disappointing final results.

I wish I could think of clever ways to use this type of mindset within my own work. I’m not sure if the blocker is because I mostly work digitally, or because I’m just not that focused on final outcomes. Maybe this is partly because I think really iteratively and systematically, and crafts are immutable.

I like to incrementally change things over time, sometimes so slowly it seems like nothing has changed at all. Sure, you can iterate crafts in a sense that each new tray you make is a new object, but each of them is a final result that can no longer evolve. A tangible, outcomes-based approach creates a snapshot of you and that object in a certain place and time indefinitely. I don’t want to have to live with my mistakes forever. I want everything in my life to be living, changing, progressing.