When Oliver and I were in Tokyo in 2013, we went shopping for stationery at Ito Ya, and I purchased a couple of packages of Japanese paper squares. They looked like this:

I used the first pack to make the Act Quickly Summer is Almost Over prints that summer, prints I’ve been happy to spot on walls from Malmö to Berlin to Isle Madame in the years since.

I decided to use the second pack for this year’s Christmas card, but decided this time that I needed to learn more about the paper. So I asked my friend Mayumi, who speaks Japanese, to translate for me. Despite having just stepped off a plane from Japan herself, she quickly and helpfully got back to me with this:

Mayumi went on to explain that “Grobei” is a thick Japanese paper, with one side sleek and the other side rough. Which describes the paper in my hand exactly.

There are 10 sheets of 10 varieties of paper in each pack, and each piece of paper is 10 cm by 10 cm  (so 10 x 10 is true in more ways than one). The varieties, while all remaining true to the “one side sleek, the other side rough” rule, run the gamut from stiff card stock printed with very subtle snowflake patterns to almost tissue-paper-like wisps. All were a joy to print on.