This pattern is from a traditional Japanese design called shippō or “seven-treasures”. The interlocking circles of shippō are said to represent the seven treasures of Bhuddism. Similar linked circle designs are found in many cultures through-out the world. The shippō or shippō-tsunagi(lit. linked seven tresures) design has been used as a motif in Japanese textile decoration since at least the Nara period (645-794). It is quite possible it was in use long before that, but there are few surviving samples of textiles from before then. A piece of fabric exists in the Shōsō-in collection with a similar shippō design done in shibori.
p. Shippō motifs are used in all forms of textile decoration, and are often used as an all over background pattern in a subtle color shift from the ground color, with the main designs layed above. This particular variant of the shippō motif is based on a stencil found in the excellent book Carved Paper – The Art of the Japanese Stencil.
- shippō on indigo
(20×20 pixels)
- shippō with transparent background
(20×20 pixel)
- shippō with indigo background
(40×40 pixel)
- shippō with transparent background
(40×40 pixel)
- shippō with indigo background
(60×60 pixel)
- shippō with transparent background
(60×60 pixel)
If some of the images appear blank—just a thin line frame around nothing—then your browser (most likely IE) has an issue displaying transparent .png files. The image is there, right click on the “empty” box and “Save Picture As” or “Save Target As”.
4 Comments
Ok that’s wierd. When I first published this it had the proper encoding on “shippō” that is to say s—h—i—p—p—o-macron”. Then I unpublished the entry, added the SixApart recently updated key, then republished. Did changing the publish status change the encoding? I can’t for the life of me see why, but then it makes even less sense to think that the recently updated key (which really only activates a trackback ping?) would change the encoding.
Oddly enough in the comment listing template it shows properly as “shippō” with the o-macron.
Ok…
So to clarify the page was for a while showing “ShippÅ” immediately followed by a box, in otherwords mangling the o-macron character into an non-valid charachter. Naturally the validator complained loudly about it, although at least IE and Mozilla would still display the page properly–save for the mangled word “shippō”. I had to go into the database itself to correct the issue. Reall pain in the arse.
Since you seem to be still having the problem of invalid SGML characters, why not give up and write ō for o-macron?
I take it you mean use the & escaped value #333 for ō? Granted that works well for this one, but…
I should be able to get UTF8 input to go straight through the system just fine, yet it’s not working that way at all. Really annoying. What’s more annoying is that the ō character (input as a UTF8 character, not as escaped #333;) shows just fine in the comments every time. So it’s something I am missing in the main entry handling.
Post a Comment