Halloween crafting in Winnipeg tends toward the familiar: pumpkins, bats, the occasional papier-mâché ghoul. On October 24, Cartizan Studio at The Forks offers something stranger and older — a skull worked in fabric, using a Japanese technique that never touches a needle.
The Kinusaiga Skull Workshop runs from 6:30 to 9:00 p.m. at Cartizan Studio at The Forks. Participants choose their own colours and patterns and build a Halloween skull out of cloth, with the studio promising results that can lean gothic, spooky, creepy or cute depending on the palette. No sewing is required. The studio pitches it as a Halloween date night, a girls' night, or simply a creative night out, and lists the workshop at $60.
Kinusaiga itself is the draw here. The word translates roughly as "silk picture," and the technique is a kind of fabric mosaic: an image is scored into a thick backing board, grooves are cut along the lines of the design, and scraps of fabric are pressed into those grooves with a pointed tool — often a seam ripper — so that each section of the picture is filled with cloth instead of paint. Nothing is stitched. The fabric is held by the tension of the slit and, in most modern versions, by adhesive sheet applied to the board first.
That no-sew premise is what makes the craft unusually forgiving. Kinusaiga is often described as a stash-buster, a way to use up quilting cotton, linen, velvet and silk leftovers, and the tools are ordinary: a craft knife, small scissors, a printed pattern divided into numbered sections, and something thin and metal to tuck the edges under. Beginners are usually steered toward designs with ten to fifteen sections — a sunrise, a landscape, something with the logic of stained glass — because the technique rewards simple, clearly bounded shapes. A skull, with its big uninterrupted planes and a handful of distinct features, fits that brief neatly, which may explain why a studio in Winnipeg landed on it as a Halloween subject.
The craft's roots are in Japan, where it grew out of an older habit of recycling precious textiles. Kimono silk was expensive and rarely discarded; worn garments were unpicked and their fabric given a second life. Kinusaiga turned that thrift into an art form, and it has since spread well beyond Japan as a hobbyist technique, taught through patterns, kits and online tutorials rather than through any single institution. Its appeal abroad is partly practical — it needs no machine and no sewing skill — and partly aesthetic: the cloth gives a picture a texture and depth that flat colour cannot.
Cartizan Studio is a relatively new arrival at The Forks. The studio describes itself as a centrally located Winnipeg art space offering classes and workshops across a wide range of mediums and for ages four to 104, from one-night paint sessions to ten-week courses in needle felting, soapstone carving, acrylic, watercolour and oil painting, clay, polymer and textile work. It opened in the Johnston Terminal at The Forks.
The skull workshop sits inside a broader Halloween program at the studio. A week earlier, on October 17, Cartizan runs a Soapstone Skull Workshop in which participants carve a raw piece of stone into a skull sculpture, and on October 25 it hosts a Métis four-petal poppy workshop teaching flat beading ahead of Remembrance Day. The pairing of stone and cloth skulls is a small illustration of the studio's stated range: the same subject, approached through two very different traditions, one carved and one tucked.
For anyone who has wanted to try kinusaiga but balked at sourcing foam board, adhesive sheets and a suitable pattern, the workshop removes most of the friction. Materials are provided, the design is set, and the session is short enough to fit into an evening. What participants take home is a piece of Halloween decor assembled from scraps — which is, in its way, exactly what the craft was invented to do.
More information and booking are available through Cartizan Studio's website, cartizanstudio.ca.