Wiping, decorating, and dressing up.
Tenugui towels are loved in Japanese daily life. Many people are collecting tenugui as a familiar dyed handicraft, since it needs little space for storage.

What characterises tenugui as a dyed handicraft is the chūsen dyeing technique, a type of stencil dyeing.
A stencil is placed on every metre from a roll of cotton fabric and dye-proof glue is applied. The fabric is folded with each glue application so that it is layered neatly. The dye is poured from the top of the dozen or so layers, enabling not just one piece to be dyed at a time, but 10 or more pieces at once. When dyeing in this way, the dye permeates well from the top sheet to the bottom sheet. In the case of the textile printing process called nassen, only the front side of the cloth is dyed, but in the case of chūsen dyeing, the fibres of the cloth themselves are dyed well so that the finished tenugui has neither back nor front.

The chūsen dyeing technique was invented in the early Meiji period in response to mass production and multi-coloured dyeing using chemical dyes.
Tenugui have been made since the Edo period, but the spread of chūsen dyeing technique made it possible to supply tenugui that were an order of magnitude more stylish and gorgeously dyed than before.

However, nowadays, there are natural dyeing artists who produce chūsen dyed tenugui using plant dyes, namely indigo, like Katsuyuki Sado. Sado, who made the tenugui in the image here, dyes without sticking to the scheme of “chūsen dyeing = chemical dyes = multi-coloured dyeing = mass production” that supported the development of tenugui production since the Meiji era. Generally speaking, unlike chemical dyes, natural dyes tend to bleed and produce unevenness, so they are often used for tie-dyeing or stencil dyeing works where each piece is dyed one at a time. It is true that the chūsen dyeing technique may not be suited to natural dyeing.
However, as a way for a dyer to pass on the skills of natural dyeing to as many people as possible, it seems to be an obvious choice to follow the idea that “chūsen dyeing = natural dyes = a certain amount of mass production”.

The idea of Mingei is to receive the blessings of nature, produce tools for daily use by hand and supply them to consumers. The handmade products made in this way, therefore, will shine brilliantly when they reach the hands of the general public and are used on a daily basis. This concept can also be applied to dyeing crafts.
Unlike one-off dyeing crafts, which are positioned as “crafts to be seen,” tenugui, which are made by effectively matching natural dyeing and chūsen dyeing, should be able to bring enrichment to the lives of many people as “crafts to be used”.