First Project of 2012: Complete!

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, my grandmother widened my beloved yabane-komon for me. Last weekend she finished it and it turned out awesome (thank you so much grandma <3).

It's wingspan grew as well as the overall width. It's probably still far from having the perfect wingspan, but it became much easier to wear.


Here are some pictures for comparison. I admit it's not that visible, because of my posing in the "before" picture. The sleeves don't look as short as they were:

Before

Dyeing Result

This is how they turned out dried and carefully ironed. The bright red cloth just shows the original colour.

Dyeing Process

Deep Blue Dye

I finally got my hands on some dyeing colours and it was quite boring this evening.
So I grabbed some scrap fabric, a yellowed and a stained han-eri and a yellowed obijime to dye it deep blue ("Marineblau" to be exact).


The results varied quite a lot and each piece worked different from the next. See what I got of my first round:
The first one (was:yellowed han-eri) is just as is should be, a beautiful deep and solid blue (it's a bit lighter in reality). It tool some time until it got that dark, but it holds the colour and has no freckles at all. The Obijime on the left, didn't take the colour that well, but it still became nice and dark in the end.
Now the second one (was: stained han-eri) represents everything you don't want to happen... believe me it's no a light reflection, this one went seriously wrong, it -is- that freckled...
I have no clue why, but it didn't take the colour in some placed, in others it did. Maybe it wasn't pure silk, or there was still some stuff within the fibres, I'll wash the pieces more thoroughly beforehand next time.
The light blue one is the scrap fabric and was only dipped in for a few seconds. I just wanted to test out if a lighter colour can be done with such a dark colour and it seems to be a success. Yay!

After finishing the first pieces I got adventurous. Why not try out some red fabric, when there is enough lying around?I chose two different ones. The burning-test suggested that both are silk, though the right one is very soft and shiny, while the other has a rather rough touch.
A big mistake I made: I should have make the fabrics wet before dyeing, but I forgot. This would have shown that the rougher fabric wouldn't hold the red at all, but bleed it out like hell.
The soft piece worked out very well in contrast. I divided it onto two pieces (they were just sewn together) and dyed them for different time periods.
Fun fact: If you look closely at the bottom of the fabrics, you can see blue threads (they were sewn together with them). This is the colour they would show if they were originally white.

Oh, and here you can see the colour of the dye-bath after the other the other red cloth bled out in it...
Happy dyeing! XD

Obi-dome Design: Kingfisher

It was kinda boring this weekend, so I tried myself in design. Maybe this would be a cute obi-dome or a brooch, let's see if I have time to make something out of it.

Sewing Kimono: 2nd Attempt

This summer I sewed a synthetic ro komon. Well, my grandmother did the sewing job and I told her how to do it (^.^). She's still showing me how to do it myself, but it's so difficult.

Here's the finished kimono. The collar needs to be corrected though, I misjudged how wide it has to be. Now it a bit too wide for a simple collar, not meant to be folded in half... Not visable, when folded in a bit like here.