Paper is carved to make the stencils that dye the cloth. Ise katagami is made by laminating washi with persimmon tannin and then cutting the pattern into it with a knife, producing a stencil through which fabric is dyed. The tannin treatment makes the laminated sheet resistant to water and humidity, so a stencil holds its shape through repeated use rather than softening on the first pass.

The cutting is patient work, and it becomes more so as the pattern gets finer: there are several quite distinct techniques for taking out dots, stripes and fine repeats one at a time, each with its own knife, its own posture and its own way of holding the sheet steady. Workshops are concentrated around Shiroko and Jike in Suzuka, and the local museum shows the cutting being done at close range, which is the only way to appreciate how small the movements are. Kintetsu reaches Nagoya in about fifty minutes, there is a great deal of employment connected to the car industry, and daily movement here is by car.

A stencil is a tool made for somebody else's trade. What is sold at the end is the cloth, so the name of the person who cut the paper rarely reaches the customer — and yet the fineness of the pattern was settled entirely at that stage, before any dye was mixed. Nothing downstream of the stencil can add detail that the stencil does not already contain, however skilled the dyer is. When you admire the pattern on a kimono, what you are actually admiring is the hand of the person who cut the paper, some months earlier and in another building.