Maru kiku maru!

I've been looking for just the right maru obi for a couple of years: not a garish obi with wedding motifs, and not an older one in deep olive green and brown. And nothing super fancy and precious. I wanted wearable and versatile. Nothing wrong with those types of obi, they were just not something I wanted to wear with  my current  kimono collection. Plus also didn't want to spend too much! Maru obi can be frightfully expensive, especially the Taisho era and some of the newer designs. So I think I found one I can use for many years with many different kimono, including my kurotomosode and the iromuji in my collection.

I just love this one.
The chrysanthemum (kiku) pattern is woven and despite quite a bit of gold and some silvery-white threads, it has a subtlety to it it that doesn't shout. I especially love the bits of blue and green; the cool colors add some freshness to the feeling of this obi. The background color is a medium beige, which seems to make it more elegant rather than bland. If the background was black it would still be lovely but it would also have more contrast and be more bold. It's not shiny like some of the modern fukuro obi you sometimes see; it has the soft sheen of a well-loved obi that someone really cherished since it's in such great condition. I'm very glad to have found it!
Cheers,
rebecca

Rebecca's Art Blog: Sewing on the sleeves

Rebecca's Art Blog: Sewing on the sleeves: I managed to cut and sew on the sleeves on the Tyvek kimono this evening. They are rolled up, otherwise not only would they get in the way, ...

Birch trees houmongi

I was going post this much earlier, but I had to wait until I had time to add this to the blog. It's a vintage houmongi with a fabulous birch tree motif on the rich tones of salmon pink and red. I have not seen a similar design before featuring birch trees. It's appears to be for the late fall or winter season since there are few leaves left on the trees and they are grey and black.  There are also some cloud-like shapes in red and yellow. What looks like greenish color or shading on the clouds is actually silver metallic paint or dyestuff. There is also some metallic silver on a few of the leaves.

The doura is bright red, indicative of a WWII-era kimono and the hakakke is a dusty salmon-rose color, slightly deeper than the peachy-pink of the kimono. I think it's a really striking design and am looking forward to wearing it one of these days!

Initially, I was thinking of a green-gold obi for this to go with the clouds; but now I think it needs a black and white hakata obi. So I will have to acquire one sometime in the near future. In the meantime, I have a lovely olive green hakata obi as well as a chuya  obi that is plain black on one side that might look really nice.

I will have to just play with the kimono sometime in the next month or so and post some pictures! The perfect obi for this kimono is out there somewhere!

 

These are all the seller's photos.
Enjoy.

Tyvek kimono

I have succeeded in creating a hitoe kimono out of DuPont Tyvek! It's almost finished...90% of it is done! It's really hard to photograph since it's white and all my walls in my studio are white, so I hung it up on the balcony and got most of it in the picture.

Soon I will have photos of it on the artist. In the next 2 weeks it will become the Ultimate Furisode, with 20-foot long sleeves! The artist that commissioned this is also working on some obi concepts, so we haven't worked that out yet. It's for a performance art piece that will be performed in LA in November. It will stay white and images will be projected onto it, just like the other costume pieces I made for this same artist.
As far as actually making it, Tyvek is interesting to work with. It cuts like a dream but doesn't tear, so it's like working with very unusual paper. It looks, sounds, and crinkles like paper but it's not. You can iron it....with a very low iron. It sews like fabric but doesn't not stretch at all, so making the collar was  a pain. I used a pattern and instructions I found online....which worked really well. The Tyvek I bought comes in a 36" wide x 50-yard roll, so there is plenty to play with and more than enough for the sleeves. I ended up making it a bit larger and longer than I thought we needed; the artist came over yesterday for a fitting and we decided it should be ankle length, like a yukata. It's easy to take it in and cut some off the bottom. There will be no ohashori since folding and keeping it flat and folded under an obi was an issue, so I just cut it to length. Who knows what the obi will be made from....maybe a found object or something sculptural.
More photos soon!
~Reb