The pattern is dyed into the warp before weaving begins. Chichibu meisen is made by stencil-dyeing the warp threads and then weaving them, teasing the bundles apart as the work proceeds, which leaves the outline of the design slightly blurred. That blur is the identifying feature of meisen rather than a flaw in it, and it also means the exact appearance of the finished cloth cannot be known until it comes off the loom.

There is a hall on Bamba-dōri where meisen is shown and sold, and along the same street stand Shōwa-period kanban-kenchiku and clothing shops of the same vintage. Meisen was everyday wear produced in very large quantities, so the scale of the trade at its height is legible in the buildings the district kept: these are not artisan premises but retail frontages built for volume. The Seibu line runs directly to Ikebukuro, the town has its own hospitals and shops, and both the mountains and the river are close at hand, which is an unusual combination for somewhere ninety minutes from a terminus.

Cloth dyed before it is woven cannot be corrected afterwards. A slight displacement of the warp shifts the pattern, so how the weaver handles the tension decides how the design comes out, and no amount of finishing will recover an error. Most textile traditions would treat that as a defect to be engineered away. Meisen exists because somebody decided the shifting was the attractive part rather than the problem, and then sold it as such, at a price ordinary households could actually pay. That decision built an industry.